Categories: News

These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 13

Highlights

 

Friends of the Firefox team

Project Updates

Add-ons

Activity Stream

  • timspurway reports that the team has re-evaluated their schedule for landing in Nightly – new estimate puts Activity Stream in Fx57

Electrolysis (e10s)

Firefox Core Engineering

Form Autofill

Mobile

  • The team ran user testing of Prox v2, which emphasizes local sights, events, and multiple sources – full conclusions upcoming!
  • Firefox for Android 53 coming soon with RTL support for Urdu, Persian, Hebrew and Arabic!
  • Activity Stream is going live for 50% of the Firefox for Android Nightly audience this week. All Nightly users will see a setting to opt-in / opt-out (Settings -> Advanced -> Experimental Features).

Platform UI and other Platform Audibles

Privacy/Security

Project Mortar (PDFium)

  • evelyn reports that the front-end work for Mortar is almost done! A few bugs remaining, but it’s getting pretty polish-y.
  • The team is currently dealing with process separation work, and waiting on this bug to land which will allow us to create a special type of JS-implemented plugin
  • The team is also tackling the printing engine as well, as we want to make sure we print PDFs as accurately as possible
  • Blocked on spinning up QA help for manual testing, but we will first add more automation test and compare the result of pdf.js to understand how much improvement we gain. (Thanks to bsmedberg’s suggestion!)
  • Talking to release team on release to-dos, and how best to keep the system add-on up to date

Quality of Experience

  • New preferences organization should land sometime this week
  • Engineers now mostly segueing into Photon stuff (which should will probably get its own section in future meetings?).

Search

  • Phase 1 of the hi-res favicons work should land before the next meeting.
  • The last big issue with one-off search buttons in the awesomebar is very close to landing.
  • Various miscellaneous fixes for the search and location bars.

Sync / Firefox Accounts

  • Fixes:
    • Sync will discard folder child order if the local timestamp is newer than the remote. This shows up most frequently on first syncs.
    • First sync for passwords was broken in Aurora and Nightly.
  • Push-driven sign-in confirmation is coming! Design doc in progress; should have more updates in the next meeting.
  • If you’re curious…

Storage Management

  • [fischer] The project target due date is 4/17.
  • [fischer] The implementations are almost done. The remained 3 bugs are expected to be resolved before the target 4/17.
  • [fischer] Bug 1312349: Hide the section of Offline Web Content and User Data in about:preferences
    • Because the Storage management handles appcache as well, after the Storage management completes, the Offline(Appcache) group will be hidden.
    • The pref to control hide the Offline group is browser.preferences.offlinegroup.enabled

Test Pilot

  • We are trying to track down some performance issues with the Test Pilot addon (“Test Pilot is making FF run slowly”). Any advice is welcome, ping fzzzy in #testpilot
  • First ever Test Pilot QA community event happened in Bangladesh last week!
    • Volunteers installed Test Pilot & did some manual testing of the Test Pilot addon and experiment addons
    • Event page
    • Tweets and photos of the event!

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

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5 comments on “These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 13”

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  1. klop*cz wrote on

    Thank you for update.

    Reply

  2. maxm wrote on

    What about multiline js console in dev tools?
    What about editing width and height in box model?
    What about moving pocket to addon?

    Reply

    1. moses wrote on

      Why would Pocket need to be moved to an add-on? It’s been bought out by Mozilla so it makes sense to incorporate into Firefox. Pocket is still technically an extension so if you’re looking to disable it, you can set extensions.pocket.enabled to false in about:config

      Reply

      1. maxm wrote on

        Because it is better to get clean install without preinstalled features, only basic functionality, and then customize with addons, than takeing care about removing unwanted features.

        It is mozilla business what their are paying for. I will never use pocket so why I have to install this with browser and then spending time on removing it?

        Reply

  3. Ayesha Jamal wrote on

    I’m impressed with the update. Thank you Firefox team.

    Reply

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