These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 6

Highlights

• A reminder that Firefox ESR 52 will be the last version to support WinXP
  • Relevant mailing list thread.
• past reports that the new permission doorhanger UI has landed!
  • 
  • Permission prompts are no longer accidentally dismissable
  • Available actions are more prominent, not just the main one
  • Working on followups in mozilla-central. Notice problems? File them blocking this bug.
• ralin reports that the new HTML-based visual video controls have landed!
  • 
• florian and MattN report that the insecure password warning in the URL bar will ship in Firefox 51!
• They also note that work on the contextual warning for insecure passwords made great progress and is currently slated for Firefox 52.
  • Flip security.insecure_field_warning.contextual.enabled to true and signon.autofillForms.http to false to test the feature.
• kitcambridge wants people to know that a new add-on has been released to let you examine your own Sync data. As always, the source is also available
  • He also has a call-to-action to validate your bookmarks data (see this mailing list thread and this follow-up post for how to contribute anonymized validator data)

Contributor(s) of the Week

• Please welcome Joe Hildebrand, who has joined Mozilla as Director of Engineering for the Firefox browsers!
• Resolved bugs (excluding employees): https://mzl.la/2gcieyv
• New Contributors
  • catdesk made how we use SpecialPowers.pushPrefEnv in one of our tests way cleaner!

Project Updates

Add-ons

• The team has published a blog post on what’s new for WebExtensions in Firefox 52
• They’re also testing out chrome.storage.sync and working on getting backend storage into release quality

Electrolysis (e10s)

• Turning on e10s-multi on Nightly (with 2 content processes) is blocked on Talos regressions and a few test failures. This should happen sometime soon during the Nightly 53 cycle (and hold on Nightly)

Firefox Core Engineering

• ddurst reports that there is going to be an aggressive push to update “orphaned” Firefox installs (44-47, inclusive) between now and the end of 2016
  • “Orphaned” = not updated since 2 versions back.
  • Concerted effort to encourage people to update from 42-47 to current (50). 42-25 isn’t a huge chunk, but this is a much more aggressive push.
  • What causes orphans?
    • Some are just users being slow to update
    • Blocked by security suite. (Avast was trying to update on users’ behalf). Some are worked out with vendors, some are actual problems.
    • Some are related to network latency (bugs have been filed and fixed), but ddurst’s team just got a machine that’s not updating and not affected by latency.
  • 3.x upgrades
    • This is something we’ll turn our attention to once the 42+ orphan level is deemed acceptable
    • Issuing updates as minor for 3.x and lower, hopefully

Form Auto-fill

• MattN wants to draw everyone’s attention to the intent to implement for DOM Web Payments API. That team is coordinating schedules with the Form Auto-fill team.

Platform UI and Other Platform Audibles

• mconley reports that the ability to style -moz-appearance: none checkbox and radio input form fields has landed on central! Aiming to try to uplift to 52.
• daleharvey made it so that we can show the login manager autocomplete popup on focus (this bug was reported 10 years ago!)
• scottwu has a patch up for review that adds a datepicker (to complement the timepicker that was recently added). Link to very detailed spec.
• A patch from MSU students Fred_ and miguel to combine the e10s and non-e10s <select> dropdown mechanisms will likely land this week (but preffed off)
• A patch by MSU student beachjar that vertically centers the <select> dropdown at the selected element will re-land soon now that he’s fixed this bug

Privacy / Security

• nhnt11 has simplified the way we open captive portal tabs

Quality of Experience

• mikedeboer reports that the demo / ideation phase for the new Theming API is nearly finished
  • An engineering plan in the making, and almost ready for feedback rounds
  • The team is looking at performance measures now (memory, new window creation, tab opening, etc)
• dolske has some onboarding updates:
  • 51 Beta is now live with the latest automigration test/data-gathering. (No wizard on startup, migrates and gives option to undo)
  • Gijs is starting work on allowing automigration-undo even after activating Sync
  • In discussions with verdi about an updated first-run experience (nutshell: simplified, focus on new-tab page so user can quickly see familiar auto-migrated data, starting point for low-key introduction of features)
    • Fewer tabs, sign in to FxA, and then directly to about:newtab. (If you migrated from Chrome, your top sites will be there)

Search

• florian reports that recent Places changes improved the performance of coloring visited links in a page and the performance of searching through history
• The team has also fixed the display of Open Search providers on sites that provide a huge amount of them

Sync / Firefox Accounts

• Sync tracker improvements have landed! Please file bugs if you have bookmark sync enabled and see missing or scrambled bookmarks.
  • 4 Mozillians have tried the About Sync validator and filed bugs. Keep them coming. (Email to kcambridge@mozilla.com)
• A new Sync storage server written in Go is coming soon

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

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