These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 8

The first Firefox Desktop Engineering meeting for 2017 took place this morning! Here are the interesting bits:

Highlights

• past wrote a blog post about some upcoming privacy and security features
• ashughes has posted some very interesting GPU Process Experiment Results
  • TL;DR: A GPU process is a very good idea!
• The Cliqz Test Pilot experiment has launched in Germany!
  • It’s available in other regions as well, but the suggestions it offers will be very Germany-centric

• Stacks are included in crash pings by default (so far on Nightly only). Plan is to extend this to release in Firefox 53
• Content process crashes now report via their own ping
  • This means that we’ll be able to get more data to help make Firefox crash less, but in a privacy-centric way. Great!
• The e10s team estimates that we will have more than 50% of our release channel users with e10s enabled by default once 51 has fully saturated, because:
  • e10s is being re-enabled for eligible users in the ru locale
  • A bunch of popular add-ons are being whitelisted for enabling e10s
• jessica and scottwu have landed the DatePicker UI!
  • Still disabled by default behind dom.forms.datetime, but it looks like this
    

    Ooooh shiny!

• We’re shipping “dev edition” theme as a built in! (both light and dark)

Contributor(s) of the Week

• Resolved bugs (excluding employees): https://mzl.la/2i6qaz6 and https://mzl.la/2k1aTnL
  • More than one bug fixed:
    • Jalen Adams
    • Pavan Karthik [:matrixisreal]
    • Sebastian Hengst [:aryx][:archaeopteryx]
    • Vishnu (:malayaleecoder)
    • Edouard Oger [:eoger]
    • Kestrel
    • Tomer Cohen :tomer
    • Tomislav Jovanovic :zombie
    • Pawan Sasanka
  • New contributors
    • Alan fixed one of the support links in Firefox
    • Aman Dwivedi removed some unneeded code from PrivateBrowsingUtils.jsm
    • Laurent added support for function keys in WebExtensions
    • Jalen Adams fixed a whole lot of different bugs!
    • Mayank removed the getURIForKeyword API
    • Srivatsav Gunisetty removed some in-content preferences.css overrides
    • Vedant Sareen added support for rejecting too-late pings in Telemetry
    • Vlad Zuga renamed generic @keyframes definitions to be more specific

Project Updates

Add-ons

• Still on course for WebExtension permissions appearing on installation in Firefox 53
• WebExtensions sidebar support mvp likely in Firefox 53
• Chrome.storage.sync on course for shipping in Firefox 53

Content Handling Enhancement

• Visual Redesign of Downloads Panel on track for Firefox 52
• Functional and Strings Redesign of Downloads Panel in Firefox 53 or 54
  • Here’s a list of the work currently in progress
• Continuing platform work on registerProtocolHandler user interface improvements and RDF deprecation

Electrolysis (e10s)

• a11y support for e10s has been bumped to Firefox 53
• Tab switch spinner graphs now show a breakdown of the 0ms – 999ms bucket
  • Also showing a nice win from bug 1323319 landing!
• e10s-multi (2 content processes by default)
  • Several e10s-multi talos regressions have been cleared
  • A fix for a shutdown leak in automation should land soon
  • Still aiming to have this landed shortly by default on Nightly (will hold on Nightly until we’re happy with stability and performance)
• The next major release (Firefox 51) has a number of e10s improvements that we’re excited about:
  • In particular, JavaScript interruption should make tab switching more responsive for most people
• 52 is an ESR release, but will have e10s enabled by default. Add-ons rules will be the same as 50 (only add-ons that are explicitly compatible will allow e10s to be enabled)
• Heads up – the Performance API has been skipping process start time and IPC transit time. A fix is in progress!

Firefox Core Engineering

• Content process crashes now report via their own ping
• ddurst reports that his team is about to land pingSender, which sends pings via a separate executable and will allow us to see final crashes and (an as-yet-unknown amount of) startup crashes
• Flash default-as-CTP SHIELD experiment targeted for Firefox 52 release
• The Firefox update UI is going to get some attention in Q1 of 2017

Form Autofill

• MattN lets us know that the Form Autofill team has made progress working on connecting to autocomplete and filling profiles.

Platform UI and other Platform Audibles

• mconley notes that we are removing the Adobe Primetime CDM. Sayonara!

Privacy/Security

• Florian reports that the new Captive Portal UI will ship in Firefox 52. Last bits of polish have just landed and are being uplifted.

Quality of Experience

• Mike de Boer and team have started to work on new-style themes. Initial WebExtension parsing has landed and support for lightweight themes is first up.
• Mike further notes that the sessionstore team is getting more organized and is working on reliability, performance and new features. He would like to welcome interested contributors to contact him to find bugs to work on.
• jaws reports that the 2017 Preferences Refresh is moving quickly thanks to the help of some of our awesome student contributors. Expect updates soon! Also, check out their neat design specs:
  • “Inconsistencies” living spec
  • Re-organization living spec

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

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