These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 4

The Firefox Desktop engineering team met together last Tuesday to chat about what they’re working on. Here are some juicy tidbits from that meeting:

Highlights

• mikedeboer wants to draw attention to a mailing list post that outlines plans for retiring Windows XP support. Note that the current plan is for Firefox 52 ESR to be the last version to support Window XP and Vista
• andym points out that a change to the Add-don SDK has landed which will dramatically increase performance. Uplift for Firefox 50 is currently being discussed
  • Here’s a video showing a before and after
• mikedeboer also reports that touch events are riding the Firefox 52 train!
• mconley wants people to know that the plan is to enable multiple content processes in Nightly but that this will not ride the trains just yet, and will hold on Nightly for now
• ddurst reports that we’re reducing the Firefox update size by changing the compression algorithm
• scottwu’s <input type=”time”> picker UI has landed but is disabled by default behind the dom.forms.datetime pref
• florian reports nhnt11’s captive portal work picking up steam. Hoping to let it ride the trains in 52!
• mikedeboer reports that selection events are also shipping in Firefox 52

Contributor(s) of the Week

• Tomislav Jovanovic :zombie
• New Contributors
  • David Malaschonok helped to refactor some Session Store code and remove some duplication
  • William CS modernized some of the code that runs Firefox Preferences
  • Sumit Tiwari made it so that file read errors from OS.File are more useful

Project Updates

Add-ons

• Users with add-ons that have multiprocessCompatible set to true in their install.rdf’s should be eligible for e10s starting in Firefox 50, assuming the two blocking bugs are fixed and uplifted

Content Handling

• seanlee and Rex Lee report that they’ve landed a patch to increase the button size for downloads in the Downloads Panel, and a patch that switches the Downloads Panel icons over to SVG
• alphan and eden are working on two bugs to help move mimeTypes.rdf to a JSON file instead

Electrolysis (e10s)

• A top crash that’s preventing us from turning e10s on for users with ru locales is being reviewed and should be uplifted to 51
• Tab switch spinner investigations ongoing. We’ve got BHR stacks for hangs that occur during tab switch, and they’re currently being examined
• The team is going to do a funnelcake study to see how e10s impacts user retention and usage
• RTL support for Windows and OS X has been signed off by SoftVision for Firefox 51
  • RTL support for Linux has landed for Firefox 52

Firefox Core Engineering

• Client-side stackwalking (which adds basic stacks in crash pings) landed on Nightly and Aurora last week; aiming for client stacks from release in 52 (fingers crossed)
  • content crash pings are landing this week, and is aiming to ride the trains
• A WIP telemetry-based stability dashboard, mostly for relman, is available here. Related bug
• Lots of bugfixes landed recently related to resuming update downloads (instead of restarting) due to network/connectivity errors, etc (stemming from 43.0.1 and 44.x orphan remediation analyses). See this wiki page for more details
• ddurst reports that the CrashSender project, which involves a new executable to send crash pings without requiring a Firefox restart, is kicking off in 3-4 weeks.

Form Auto-fill

• Landed a bunch of fixes lately:
  • Implement an API in the content process to fill a form with a specific form autofill profile using @autocomplete
  • Switch toolkit Form Autocomplete popup from using a <xul:tree> to using a <xul:richlistbox>
  • As well as some clean-up and refactoring
• Current work in progress:
  • Implementing form auto-fill profile storage
  • Implement an API in the parent process to decide which values of an autofill profile would be filled in which field
  • Dialog to add/edit/view an autofill profile

Go Faster

• Next areas of focus are likely to be improving the system add-on roll-out facilities (tools to make publishing easier) & update times (time from publish to when a user is running with the update).
  • Restartless system add-ons likely to land soon
  • Other issues being discussed in this bug

Localization

• Update on L20n in Firefox
  • Hitting performance snags when touching XUL nodes dynamically using JS, so we’re talking to the Technical Architecture Group about that
  • We need someone to debug a test failure of one specific unit test
  • Development is occurring on https://hg.mozilla.org/projects/larch/

Platform UI and Other Platform Audibles

• daleharvey fixed a bug that was preventing GMP installation for 64-bit OS’s
• mconley is working with Layout to make it easier to style checkbox / radio boxes
• Simplify Page feature for Print Preview has been disabled in a few areas:
  • Only enabled on Nightly for Linux until this bug is fixed
  • Enabled on Windows up to early beta until these two bugs are fixed

Privacy / Security

• The latest patch for permission prompts is in the second round of reviews.
• Contextual insecure password warning is still targeting Firefox 52. Getting help from seanlee, jkt, mconley, and daleharvey

Quality of Experience

• Firefox Theming API building on the Cedar twig is chugging along:
  • K-9 landed dynamic themes support
  • mikedeboer landed Chrome theme compatibility
  • mikedeboer is currently working on re-implementing the Developer Edition theme using the API

Search

• Fixed various regressions around the awesomebar, but more importantly, fixed some telemetry bugs that were discovered after the recent changes for one-off search buttons in the location bar. The beta channel proved immune to these issues, so the SHIELD study for unified search can proceed as planned.

Video Controls

• The new, HTML-based UI is up for review

Here are the raw meeting notes that were used to derive this list.

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