These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 9

Highlights

• Firefox 51 was released!
  • Includes the new Zoom Indicator in the URL bar when zoom level is non-default
  • Improved e10s tab-switching!
  • Whitelist of ~700 addons for e10s
    • Tested with Beta audience to make sure they don’t break/regress Firefox, but the functions of the add-ons themselves were not tested.
• Putting the text representation of the new Mozilla logo (“moz://a”) into the URL bar now sends the user somewhere – landed in 53, approved to uplift to 52.
• e10s-multi has landed! 2 content processes are currently the default. This is holding on Nightly until we get performance and stability up to snuff.
• Michael Verdi has written a blog post about the upcoming Firefox onboarding test
  • 
    For the folks who can’t see the embedded video, here’s a link!
• The new Theming API is being worked on and more patches are landing. You can set extensions.webextensions.themes.enabled=true in about:config to enable the new API.

Friends of the Firefox team

(Give a shoutout/thanks to people for helping fix and test bugs. Introductions)

• Resolved bugs (excluding employees): https://mzl.la/2kOUL55
  • More than one bug fixed:
    • Pavan Karthik [:matrixisreal]
    • Sebastian Hengst [:aryx][:archaeopteryx]
    • Stefan [:stefanh]
    • Tomer Cohen :tomer
  • New contributors (? = First Patch!)
    • Alan fixed a strictness warning in our Preferences code
    • George Pîrlea fixed some buggy handling of context menu selections for the Downloads Panel
    • ? George Veneel Dogga [::TheLayman]  converted some of our migrator tests to use mozIStorageAsyncConnection
    • ? Zachary Herrick fixed some inconsistent casing in our strings in Preferences
    • ?Kevin Gay removed some unneeded code from CrashManager.jsm
    • ? Ilya Gordeev added Blob support to SQLite.jsm
    • ? Premang made it easier to select tabs that are mostly scrolled past the end of the strip
    • Vedant Sareen removed the E10S_WINDOW Telemetry probe
    • ? Ian Ferguson fixed the spacing before the “Learn More” links in Preferences

Project Updates

Add-ons

• andym wrote a blog post about WebExtensions in Firefox 53

Activity Stream

• Activity Stream targeting to land as a feature in Firefox 56 (about:newtab, about:home)
• Activity Stream add-on 1.3.0 released today
• One team is working on the Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
  • Preparing for second Shield experiment to improve ‘top site’ engagement
  • Identified and planned MVP features for release
  • Launching Experimenter to control A/B experiments and manage their dashboards and results
• Another team is working on graduating the code into the codebase as per our engineering standards
  • Export scripts/processes for m-c
  • Integration testing
  • L10n, I18n, RTL
  • Accessibility
  • Talos / Performance
  • And the other various cross-team wheels that must be turned to ship a large user-facing feature in Firefox

Electrolysis (e10s)

• mrbkap is working on making content process selection something that WebExtensions could possibly tweak in the future
• gabor is working on a content process pre-allocator to queue up a content process for faster perceived start-up time
• blassey added the OS pid to the tab tooltips (for E10S_TESTING_ONLY, so this will never ship to the release channel)
• beachjar and jaws landed a patch that should enable some styling of <option> elements in <select> dropdowns with e10s. Currently, this is text colour and background colour.

Firefox Core Engineering

• Crash stacks are collected in crash pings, now in 53.
• Solved issue (thank you, releng!) for stuck 44.b1 users, so stuck users should start successfully updating. (bugs 1334220 and 1277925)
• XPCOM symbols are no longer exported for 53+ (see dev.platform thread)
  • This prevents evil DLL injection from third-party applications which should improve stability and reliability

Form Autofill

Team meetings next week in Taipei. Chinese New Year holiday going on now ??.

Resolved bugs:

• [Form Autofill] Prevent duplicate add-on registration
• Fill the autocomplete result with real profile by using profile storage API

Go Faster

• New system add-ons will be used to roll out SHA1 deprecation and enabling of TLS 1.3

Platform UI and other Platform Audibles

• tnikkel has added the composite time to the MozAfterPaint event

Privacy / Security

• The updated permission prompts that shipped in Firefox 53 are receiving some final polishing and bugfixes.
• We are improving accessibility of the control center panel (meta bug) and the permission prompts
• The team is also focusing efforts on finishing the insecure password UI, which are now in beta 52.

Quality of Experience

• Ability to search <select> dropdowns with 40+ <option> elements has landed (preffed off behind dom.forms.selectSearch). This was work by tmaklebust and beachjar, both MSU students from last semester, and new contributors!
• There is ongoing work for the new funnelcake on 52 (as funnelcake for 51 is going out the door!) – metabug: (1332318)

Search

• Standard8 fixed a long-standing frecency bug involving redirects
• We are starting a new effort to add more telemetry probes to searchbar and urlbar

Sync / Firefox Accounts

Work continues on Bug 676563 – Bookmarks sync does not sync bookmark timestamps

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

Want to help us build Firefox? Get started here!

Here’s a tool to find some mentored, good first bugs to hack on.