These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 11

Highlights

• Just in case you didn’t get the memo, the add-ons team blogged about their plans up to Firefox 57.
• New WebExtension APIs have landed in Nightly, including:
  • Sidebar API
    • Check out these prototype sidebar tabs!
  • Custom protocol handlers API
  • Privacy APIs
  • DevTools APIs, devtools panel API landed
    • We’ll soon be able to support Redux DevTools! Check out this video:
      
  • URL overrides for about:home and about:newtab
• Reminder: when Firefox 52 is released (1 week!), non-Flash plugins are not supported by default
  • That means that Acrobat Reader, Java and Silverlight will not function.
  • This also includes Google Hangouts. ?
• The Mobile team has started building Firefox Focus for Android!
• Mozilla has been accepted into Google Summer of Code! Here are the Firefox projects.
• Test Pilot has launched some new experiments!
  • Launched last week: Snooze Tabs and Pulse
  • Launching tomorrow (Wednesday): Containers
    • Containers are currently in Nightly. Test Pilot is being used to measure engagement and iterate on the UI. Read more about the goals and plans here.

Friends of the Firefox team

• Resolved bugs (excluding employees): https://mzl.la/2mpsGpV
  • More than one bug fixed:
    • Deepa
    • Mayank
    • Svetlana Orlik
    • Tomislav Jovanovic :zombie
    • Vedant Sareen [:fionn_mac]
  • New contributors (? = First Patch!)
    • ? Chandler got rid of some leftover SVGs we were packaging
    • ? Timothy Pan fixed a graphics glitch in the fullscreen mode warning dialog
    • Deepa cleaned up some of our macOS theming code
    • kevin.kwong.chip fixed a graphics glitch in about:addons

Project Updates

Add-ons

• Currently unsure if WebExtensions installation permissions will land in 54 or 55, most likely 55.
• Out of process WebExtensions coming in 55.

Activity Stream

• Removing dependence on Add-on SDK for landing in mozilla-central as a result of Talos testing and deprecation of APIs. Starting with API replacing / inlining, bootstrapping / loader alternatives, testing infrastructure.
• The team has identified chunks of their project that they can land in mozilla-central independently of one another, and work is underway here
• The team will still use the system add-on architecture where we feel we need to iterate more quickly, such as our UI code

Content Handling Enhancement

• Download progress indication redesign reviewed and will land in a matter of days.

Electrolysis (e10s)

• Planning is currently underway to do an e10s-multi experiment on a future release. Currently defining cohort sizes.
• Native Stacks are now available for BHR on Windows, and stacks are starting to trickle in for tab switch spinners.
• mconley found a case where we’ll show tab switch spinners when blocked by JS, even with force-painting. Working on a patch.

Firefox Core Engineering

• Looked into “one” problematic Aurora 51 client that was messing up our graphs.
• Looking into lack of application of hotfix for websense in 47 and 48 (despite users actually having the hotfix).
• pingSender should be fully functional and out of QA this week. Will be used for sending crash pings on Nightly, Aurora, and Beta next week.
• Starting to work on a background download service for updates.

Form Autofill

• Team met for a workweek in Taipei
  • Discussions with layout/DOM on platform dependencies
  • Got form fill working with Enter from autocomplete
  • Finalizing preferences design with UX
  • Collecting data on the form structures of targeted US e-retailers
• Fixed
  • Fill the selected autofill profile when an autocomplete entry is chosen
  • [Form Autofill] Prevent duplicate autocomplete search registration
  • [Form Autofill] Add built-in debug logging to ease debugging
  • add a new profile item <binding> and make rich-result-popup append item accordingly
  • Fallback to form history if there is no form autofill profile saved
  • Replace async getEnabledStatus with initialProcessData for content process init
  • Hide the result without primary label in ProfileAutoCompleteResult
  • Implement two column layout for profile item binding
  • Make adjustHeight method adapt profile item list
  • Form autofill popup won’t apply to an auto-focused input until it’s refocused
• In Progress
  • Dialog to add/edit/view an autofill profile
  • Use FormAutofillHandler.autofillFormFields to fill in fields
  • Fallback to form history if whole profiles doesn’t have any data for the specific fields
  • Fallback to form history if the target field doesn’t have data in selected profile

Mobile

• daleharvey has the beginnings of Progressive Web App support working in Fennec, and will be posting more patches for review soon!
• Firefox Focus 3.1 for iOS is scheduled to to ship end of the month. This release only contains locale updates. The product went from 27 to 51 supported languages!
• Firefox for iOS 7.0 has entered the stabilization phase and is expected to ship about 4 weeks from now. This release includes a migration of the codebase to Swift 3.0, stability fixes and Top Tabs for iPad. We will be doing TestFlight beta builds in the coming weeks. You can sign up for those here!
• Firefox for iOS 8.0 development has started. Primary focus is landing Activity Stream
• The Mobile team has started an engineering blog!
• Landed various improvements to Android Sync. Better uploader, smarter sync flow, with a focus on data correctness
• Project Prox aims to have our second user test in early March. Our new build is an iteration on the previous user test, addressing user feedback such as the need for more consistent data, filters, and a map view.

Platform UI and other Platform Audibles

• jessica and scottwu have been working on proper localization support for the Date/Time pickers
• Styling work for the <select> dropdown has finished; riding the 54 train. Let jaws or mconley know if you see any issues.

Privacy/Security

• More polish work around the permissions project (53) and in-context password warning (52) project.
• Test Pilot experiments progress: Tracking Protection concluded, Containers is about to launch.

Quality of Experience

• Lightweight themes will soon be implemented purely through CSS variables once this bug lands
• We are close to getting the new (Web Extension-based) themes to show up in the Add-ons Manager. This work is being tracked here
• Blog post announcing Theming API by dolske
• Improvements to importing are ongoing
  • Turning on automatic migration/import on nightly, aurora and early beta starting with 54
  • Running another experiment on beta 53 to see why/when people don’t like us importing their history/bookmarks from another browser (with a survey)
  • Dão added some limits so we don’t import ALL THE HISTORY all the time when importing from Chrome (currently looking at 6 months and 2000 urls as a limit)
  • Gijs tried to make history import not hang quite so much by reducing main thread communication
• Preferences reorg/search
  • The work to reorganize the Preferences continues to push forward. Going through review cycles now. We are hoping to get the reorganization work to land at the beginning of the Nightly 55 release cycle.
  • Integrating search within the Preferences is also on-going, and will also likely land in the 55 release cycle though the two projects are not tied to each other.

Search

• Landed some Awesomebar and Places fixes.
• High-rez favicons are coming!

Sync / Firefox Accounts

• Bookmark repair work landing this week. This is important for unblocking iOS sync.
• New UI to show all synced tabs in the panel.

Test Pilot

• Page Shot in FF 54
  • Page Shot will now be a bootstrapped addon + embedded WebExtension, and will ship as a system addon.
• Please submit your ideas for new Firefox features!
  • We’ve simplified our Test Pilot experiment proposal form. Learn more.

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

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