These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 10

Highlights

• The Sidebar WebExtension API (compatible with Opera’s API) has been implemented ?
• Preferences reorg and search project is fully underway. jaws and mconley lead a “hack-weekend” this past weekend with some MSU students working on the reorg and search projects
  • Video of search work-in-progress, being implemented by iFerguson and manotejmeka
    
  • Preference reorg screenshots, being implemented by zack and ava1on:

    

    

    

    
    

    

    

    
    
• A lot of people were stuck on Firefox Beta 44, we found out about it and fixed it. Read more about it on :chuttens blog
• According to our Telemetry, ~62% of our release population has multi-process Firefox enabled by default now ?
• Page Shot is going to land in Firefox 54.  We are planning on making it a WebExtension so that users can remove it fully if they choose to.

Friends of the Firefox team

• Resolved bugs (excluding employees): https://mzl.la/2ksFIxm
  • More than one bug fixed:
    • Iaroslav Sheptykin
    • Mayank
    • Sebastian Hengst [:aryx][:archaeopteryx]
    • Tomislav Jovanovic :zombie
    • Tooru Fujisawa [:arai]
  • New contributors (? = First Patch!)
    • ahsan.r.kazmi reorganized some of the code that queries the Places database
    • Dorel Barbu converted some of the graphics used for our Sync interfaces from PNG to SVG

Project Updates

Activity Stream

• Intent to Implement System Add-on thread on firefox-dev
• Activity Stream localized in 30+ locales :+1: @flod and @mathjazz and team for all the help
• Two separate teams working on ‘graduation’ (landing Activity Stream in m-c) and MVP (product features and A/B testing to ensure high user engagement)

Content Handling Enhancement

• Landed string redesign inside Downloads Panel
• Next is the download progress indication redesign
  • Both scheduled for Firefox 54, while the visual redesign landed in Firefox 52

Electrolysis (e10s)

• e10s-multi is tentatively targeted to ride the trains in Firefox 55
  • Hoping to use a scheme where we measure the user’s available memory in order to determine maximum content process count
  • Here’s the bug to track requirements to enable e10s-multi on Dev Edition by default

Firefox Core Engineering

• This week we’re forcing Flash on Linux to be windowless and removing the support code for windowed mode on Linux. Should cause much better scrolling behavior with e10s, and kill a class of random-oranges.
• “Ping sender” landed! Will allow us to get telemetry data immediately at shutdown instead of waiting for next startup. Dramatically reduced data latency, starting with crash pings

Form Autofill

• Landed
  • Make adjustHeight method adapt profile item list
  • Cleanup browser/extensions/formautofill/.eslintrc.js
  • Need to have a place in the Preference -> Setting for users to launch the profile list add/edit/remove dialog
  • Fallback to form history if form autofill pref is disabled
  • [Form Autofill] Prevent duplicate autocomplete search registration
  • Fill the selected autofill profile when an autocomplete entry is chosen

Go Faster

• 1-day uptake of system add-ons is ~85% in beta (thanks to restartless), and ~72% in release (Wiki)

Platform UI and other Platform Audibles

• mconley made it so that opening new maximized windows on Windows skips the opening animation
• Have filed a number of Photon-related bugs for Platform to aid in performance (both perceived and legit)
• Patch up for review to turn on menulist powered <select> dropdown on non-e10s by default
  • This is based on work from last semester’s MSU students, Fred_ and miguel!
• jaws has been landing patches to add more styling support to <option> and <select> with the menulist popup
  • meta-ish bug
  • Still need to address contrast bug when using bright theme on Linux
• bram gave UX feedback on requirements / bugs for search in long <select>’s
  • jaws has started to turn those into bugs

Privacy/Security

• All but one P1 52 beta bug for the insecure login field contextual warning are fixed so the plan is to ship the feature in 52. If you haven’t already, please give it a try and file any bugs blocking 1304224 before it’s too late. Existing bugs are in the spreadsheet.
• More polish work for the permissions project happening in 53. More ongoing work on improving accessibility in particular.

Search

• Fixed a glaring problem with one-off buttons in scaled (zoomed) display configurations that made the search settings button appear in a separate line.
• We now correctly report when a search engine could not be installed due to an invalid format.
• Some Places work mostly in preparation of support for hi-res favicons.

Sync / Firefox Accounts

• Bookmark repair is coming. This is important for unblocking sync on Firefox iOS, which won’t sync if the server has missing or structurally incorrect bookmarks.
• Digging in to password sync failures, including the infamous key3.db issue that prevents Sync from working entirely.
• Fixed a regression when disabling and re-enabling bookmark syncing in Sync preferences.
• Caching the avatar and display name to avoid extra requests to the FxA profile server.

Storage Management

• Fischer has been working on implementing Persistent Storage section of preferences. Right now this section is hidden by default and if shown it will only show sites that have requested Persistent Storage. Eventually it will show other site data and we will remove the redundant areas of the Preferences as part of the Site Data project.

Test Pilot

• Two experiments, No More 404s and Tracking Protection, are graduating this week from the Test Pilot program.
• Three new experiments coming on February 22nd.
  • Test Pilot experiment pipeline Trello board

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.