These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 12

Highlights

• Turning on the permissions dialog for WebExtensions this week
  

  Now you get a better sense of what the add-on is capable of.

• Download progress indication redesign landed and is now in Nightly and Firefox Developer Edition! (UX spec)
  • Special thanks to the front-end engineering and user experience team who worked on the project: Bryant Mao, Carol Huang, Morpheus Chen, Rex Lee, and Sean Lee!
• e10s-multi tentatively scheduled to ship to release in Firefox 55 with 4 content processes
  • Recent measurements show that we’re quite competitive, memory-wise, in this configuration
    

    Feeling slim and trim!

• Updated orphaning dashboard! This will help us figure out why some people are stuck on older versions of Firefox.
• You can now reorder tabs in Firefox for Android (Nightly)!

  • You can reorder tabs in Nightly builds of Firefox for Android now! https://t.co/2jYkPXUmYY – Code contributed by our volunteer Tom Klein. 🙂 pic.twitter.com/m9F5Gm1eFn

    — Sebastian Kaspari (@Anti_Hype) March 13, 2017

• ?New Test Pilot experiment?: Containers launched March 2nd
  • Intrigued? Try it or read the Hacks post
  • A lot of community interest, running product prioritization through GH upvotes
  • Please submit your ideas for new Firefox features ??
• ehsan sent out a Quantum Flow Engineering Newsletter that you should read

Friends of the Firefox team

• Resolved bugs (excluding employees): https://mzl.la/2mHvE8d
  • More than one bug fixed:
    • Bharat Raghunathan
    • Deepjyoti Mondal
    • Kevin Jones
    • Svetlana Orlik
    • Tomislav Jovanovic :zombie
    • Vedant Sareen [:fionn_mac]
  • New contributors (? = First Patch!)
    • Avikalpa Kundu [:kalpa] added a GTest for the Telemetry Histogram API
    • ? Barun Parruck removed some redundant CSS from toolbar.css
    • ? Bharat Raghunathan made Sync logs on Nightly more useful
    • Vineet Reddy removed some unneeded SVGs
    • ? milindl made Control-tab previews more efficient
    • ? Kate Ustiuzhanina removed some unneeded Telemetry for Desktop
    • ? CactusTribe made search engine tooltips more useful
    • ? Subhdeep Saha made Control-tab previews not update until they really need to
    • ? Tony fixed some styling glitches in the Add-ons Manager
• Welcome goes out to Sam Foster (:sfoster) and Jim Porter (:squib) who have just joined the Firefox team!

Project Updates

Add-ons

• Working on streaming download API
• Graduating first experiment in Firefox 55, nsLoginInfo API, which allows add-on authors to access and edit saved logins in the browser
• Work to deprecate XUL add-ons in Firefox 57 will start to land this release, preffed off by default.

Activity Stream

• ursula landed a patch that allows the Activity Stream system add-on to override about:newtab, which also greatly simplifies nsIAboutNewTabService (removing a bunch of the old remotely-hosted newtab stuff).
• k88hudson added the first bits of the Activity Stream system add-on to browser/extensions
• jkerim is working on modifying PageMetadata.jsm for Activity Stream’s purposes
• dmose added testing automation of m-c export with push to pine project branch
• rlr implemented new customization page allowing showing of search/sites/highlights

Electrolysis (e10s)

• In order to ensure that our latest-and-greatest devtools are getting enough beta coverage, users on beta will have a greater likelihood of having e10s enabled if they enable devtools
• e10s-multi experiment planned for Firefox 54
• Took another swing at tab switch spinners with this bug
  • Seeing a ~6% drop in the number of Nightly clients seeing spinners after landing (March 8th)
• Landed a probe to collect data on when tab switch spinners tend to appear
• mconley is working on restoring on-demand tabs in the content process again to improve perceived session start time

Firefox Core Engineering

• Flash
  • Running a telemetry experiment this month on 55 (nightly) to see how the Flash-as-click-to-play-by-default behaves, in advance of a 53 release Shield study
• Crash pings on Nightly 55 and Aurora 54:
  • …are being sent by pingSender;
  • …have content crash pings;
  • …have raw stacks in those crash pings.
  • Building the ability to gather info from that data starts this week.
  • Reminder that FPO is off as of 53.
• Main shutdown pings are going to be sent via pingSender in 55
• Beginning work on Update Agent, which will continue downloading an update if the user’s session has ended
• Updater
  • Simplification of Updater UI aimed at 55
  • Changes for MAR signing are unblocked (compression (LZMA) and cert (SHA-384)), aiming for land by the end of Q1.

Form Autofill

• Aiming to wrap up dev milestone 1 in 55. Some developers are starting on milestone 2 items as they finish their M1 ones.
• Starting work on telemetry
• Resolved
  • Use FormAutofillHandler.autofillFormFields to fill in fields
  • Display parsed value in the corresponding column instead of showing JSON string
  • Dialog to add/edit/view an autofill profile
  • Support multiple column autocomplete popup rich list for form autofill feature
• In Progress
  • M1: Add/delete autofill profiles and show add/edit as a subdialog
  • M1: Fallback to form history in two cases
  • M2: [Form Autofill] Implement offline heuristics to determine the fieldname of input fields
  • M2: [Form Autofill] Support name fields in profiles
  • M2: Notify formautofill add-on of which item is being hovered in the suggestion dropdown
  • M2: [Form Autofill] Implement offline heuristics to determine the fieldname of input fields
• UX has a spec to address the phishing concern

Mobile

• Shipped Firefox Focus 3.1 with support for 20 new locales!
• Extended the beta period for Firefox for iOS 7.0 as well as a new beta build for user testing

Platform UI and other Platform Audibles

• jessica is adding localization support to the <input type=”time”> input box
• scottwu is making the DateTime picker popup initialize lazily, and has also added RTL support
• Some bugs have been filed for better Windows platform integration

Privacy/Security

• Polish work for permission notifications + insecure password warning (live in 52 ?)
• johannh is working on getting right click + autocomplete/insecure password warning behavior to work correctly for password and username fields
• nhnt11 is working on a few polish bugs for permissions notifications
• paolo is fixing regressions (and importantly, bug 1345449 – doorhanger won’t stay open when the browser window is minimized)

Quality of Experience

• Will soon be handing off most of the Theme API work to the WebExtensions team to allow transitioning to the Photon work.
• Preferences work is moving along, the patches are looking good and we are going through review cycles now.
• Continuing to work on performance of importing data from other browsers.
  • Currently looking at a 10 times runtime improvement for bookmark import \o/ ???
  • History import improvements have landed on 54 and uplifted to 53.

Search

• New telemetry probes starting to land.
• Working patches posted for hi-res favicons refactoring.

Sync / Firefox Accounts

• The Mobile Bookmarks folder is now visible in the Bookmarks menu bar and toolbar after a successful Sync! This is the result of work done by the Sync and SUMO teams to help make Firefox Sync easier to use.

Test Pilot

• Page Shot in 54 is on track.
  • For more details, see the github bug tracker
  • Questions/comments? Say hi in #pageshot or the pageshot-staff mailing list
• Experiments updating this week:
  • Snoozetabs (adding localization and bug fixes)
  • Min Vid (adding better metrics and bug fixes).  History/Upcoming queues coming soon
  • Cliqz v2 (new UI) coming soon

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

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