Categories: News

These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 11

Highlights

Friends of the Firefox team

Project Updates

Add-ons

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

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

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

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

Search

Sync / Firefox Accounts

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.

Want to help us build Firefox? Get started here!

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

One comment on “These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 11”

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  1. kitsune wrote on

    Please release issue 12… ;_;
    I am desperate to read about what changed in FF 55.0a1

    kind greetings and thanks for writing these

    Reply

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