These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 7

The last Firefox Desktop Engineering meeting for 2016 recently occurred! Here are the relevant tidbits.

Highlights

• If you haven’t already seen it, a Very Important blog post from the Add-ons Team has been posted regarding add-ons in 2017.
• andym reports that some new WebExtension APIs have been added, or are underway:
  • contextualIdentities API now available. This is the Add-ons Team delivering on the promise of extending the Chrome Extension API.
  • browsingData API in progress
  • Devtools API in progress
  • Permissions UI for WebExtensions slated to land in 53
• florian happily reports that better captive portal detection is now riding the trains and is scheduled to ship in 52!
• MattN is asking folks to please test the insecure login field warning. It’s not yet enabled by default, pending some automated test fixes. This feature shows a warning in the autocomplete popup when filling in login forms sent over HTTP. Enable by setting:
  • security.insecure_field_warning.contextual.enabled to true
  • signon.autofillForms.http to false
• Reader Mode now shows a reading time estimate 
  

  Apparently, this article is a pretty short read.

• Tab titles are faded out now instead of cropped with an ellipsis!
  
  

  This means you get to see more characters too.

• Rust is now required by default to build Firefox

Contributor(s) of the Week

• Resolved bugs (excluding employees): https://mzl.la/2h6xY5V
  • More than one bug fixed:
    • Matheus Longaray (:mlongaray)
    • Tomer Cohen :tomer
    • Tooru Fujisawa [:arai]
  • New contributors:
    • Aniruddha Patil cleaned up some of our styling for the Developer Edition theme
    • Avikalpa Kundu removed some unnecessary Telemetry
    • Iulian Radu got rid of an obscure preference that we no longer need
    • katecastellano simplified some of our @media selectors for our Windows themes
    • Jalen Adams removed an unused image from the tree
    • Pavan Karthik removed some of our expired Telemetry histograms
    • Vedant Sareen updated SessionStore so that it doesn’t store the (now unneeded) crop attribute

Project Updates

Add-ons

• andym reports that the Washington Post Trump article has been updated with the Firefox version of the add-on. This is yet another example of the WebExtensions API making it easy to ship multi-browser add-ons!

Activity Stream

• Activity Stream desktop has released a Shield study.  The goal is to optimize for user engagement before becoming the default about:newtab experience
  • Here’s the team’s GitHub Project board for the study

Content Handling Enhancement

• seanlee has re-organized the context menu for Download Panel items
• seanlee has also made it so that paused downloads do not get included in the download footer summary information
• A few more Download Panel improvements are coming soon! Stay tuned!

Electrolysis (e10s)

• Here’s the tracking bug for e10s-multi talos blockers
  • Graphics suspects that at least the tps regression is caused by us not sharing the glyph cache between content processes.
• mconley fixed Bug 1323586 – No frame painted when switching to a remote tab that’s undergoing paint suppression
• There are now graphs to help give us a sense of how many of our users are impacted by tab switch spinners, and if our improvements are having an impact
• e10s has been re-enabled for users in ru-* locales

Firefox Core Engineering

• Content process crash pings has landed! This means we get (privacy-preserving) stacks for content process crashes for users that have Telemetry enabled
• Stability dashboards have been moved to this URL
• We’re going to push for encouraging users of 43-47 to update to current (exact date TBD, but before the end of this month).
• Work has started to improve the update installation UI
  • UI Mock-ups

Platform UI and other Platform Audibles

• jjong landed Bug 1286182 – Implement the layout for <input type=date>
  • This is currently disabled behind dom.forms.datetime and dom.forms.datetime.timepicker
• MSU students have finished up their semester – see this update on jaws’ blog, along with their excellent final video presentation
  • Bug 1300784 – Combine e10s and non-e10s <select> dropdown mechanisms
    • A blocking bug autolanded yesterday, this will hopefully land today (preffed off)
  • Bug 1309935 – Add ability to find within select dropdown when over 40 elements
    • Currently undergoing review iterations

Privacy / Security

• When a captive portal is detected in Firefox 53, cert error pages will describe the actual problem and provide a link to log in to the captive portal
  • More polish work for captive portal detection to follow!
• Editing the location bar will now hide any notification icons that pertain to the currently visible page to avoid confusion about the properties of the page about to be visited

Quality of Experience

• Kicking off a project to update preferences UI and remove inconsistencies
  • UX team in Taipei completed user research and user testing of different organizations to get a more productive, consistent UI
  • Here’s the spec
  • There are great bugs in here for mentoring, and hacking on Firefox for the first time! Like this one! Or this one! Or this one! Or this one!
• New theme API
  • Work will begin in Q1 to start implementing the Theme API in mozilla-central
  • Community outreach soon to communicate the planned API
  • Will schedule a couple short meetings with some Firefox front-end engineers to discuss implementation and ask for feedback on internal API
• Onboarding 51 funnelcake
  • Work is ongoing to provide a new onboarding experience for new Firefox users as part of a funnelcake running against Firefox 51 release

Search

• Drew posted a first draft of a patch that will allow add-ons to replace the entire AwesomeBar dropdown without having to go through XBL or XUL. This is groundwork to potentially expose this as a WebExtension API.
• The SHIELD study for a unified URL and search bar is still ongoing. The results are expected some time in January.

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

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