These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 13

Highlights

• We’ve now got 4 content processes on by default on Nightly!
• Background tabs are being restored in the content process by default now, improving perceived session restore performance, especially for users with a large number of tabs.
• Netflix just enabled support for Firefox on Linux!
• Activity Stream 1.7.0 has been released on Test Pilot
  • Experiment for improving Top Sites engagement
  • Lots of customization improvements! Here’s the changelog!
• Firefox Screenshots (formerly Page Shot) is still on track for beta uplift in 54
  • Special thanks to Mark Banner for writing the patch for Firefox, and Dave Townsend and Kris Maglione for reviewing the add-on.
  • If interested in learning more, #screenshots on IRC
• We’re now doing off-main-thread animation on tab throbbers, which should improve perceived smoothness by being 60fps as often as possible

  • 

    This was captured at 30fps, but rendered at 60fps!

• Please submit your ideas for new Firefox features that we can try as Test Pilot experiments! 🍕🎉

Friends of the Firefox team

• Resolved bugs (excluding employees)
  • More than one bug fixed:
    • Deepjyoti Mondal
    • Federico Padua [:fedepad]
    • Hrishikesh Barman[:geekodour08]
    • Jan Beich
    • Jan Henning [:JanH]
    • Meghana Gupta
    • Paavini Nanda
    • Prathiksha
    • Tomislav Jovanovic :zombie
    • flyingrub
  • New contributors (🌟 = First Patch!)
    • 🌟 Bharat Raghunathan got rid of an icon that we don’t need anymore!
    • 🌟 Clinton Feng removed some unnecessary Telemetry!
    • Deepa switched over some of our Telemetry code to use async and await!
    • ganesh2583 fixed some glitches with our in-content focus rings!
    • 🌟 Hrishikesh Barman[:geekodour08] cleaned up some of our CSS!
    • 🌟 Joseph Cameron changed which Sync API version that we say we support!
    • 🌟 Konstantin (:trx) beefed up our Flake8 checks for some of our Telemetry code!
    • 🌟 maxim fixed a bug in about:preferences where we weren’t properly resetting custom settings when switching between history-remembering modes
    • Meghana Gupta fixed a broken Learn More link for a certificate pinning error page!
    • Paavini Nanda beefed up our Flake8 checks by enabling another rule!
    • Prathiksha fixed a styling inconsistency in our about:neterror page!
    • Subhdeep Saha switched over yet even more of our Telemetry code to use async and await!

Project Updates

Add-ons

• Here’s a blog post on a slight change to compatibility milestones
  • Firefox won’t run in multiprocess mode unless all enabled add-ons have the multiprocessCompatible flag set to true or are WebExtensions
  • Developers who haven’t set this flag don’t have to worry about multiprocess compatibility and can focus on porting to WebExtensions and making the Firefox 57 deadline

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)

• There will be an e10s-multi experiment once Firefox 54 reaches Beta that will test 4 different cohorts: 1 content process, 2 content processes, 4, and 8. 25% of users in each. The goal is for e10s-multi to ride the Firefox 55 train.
• A reminder that sync IPC and sync messages are to be avoided at all costs

Firefox Core Engineering

• We will soon be running an experiment on Nightly that makes Flash click-to-play (and fallback to HTML5 video if available) by default with some default allow/deny lists as well.
• Reminder: crash pings (both main and content) contain raw crash stacks as of 53.
• Verified that some clients did not receive updates to pushed system addons when the updated addons were included in a subsequent build (such as, say, websense-related). This has been fixed.

Form Autofill

• Only a few remaining M1 bugs which means we will start calling for Nightly testing in a few weeks after some sanity checks and polish
• Fixed
  • 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
  • Allow manually adding an autofill profile from the management interface
  • Allow deleting autofill profiles from the management interface
• In Progress
  • Interface to manage autofill profiles
  • Specify text color of selected profile item instead of inheriting from global autocomplete style
  • Improve subdialog.js to support multiple dialogs
  • [Form Autofill] A utility library for handling full name and separated names
  • Notify formautofill add-on of which item is being hovered in the suggestion dropdown
  • Implement label element extraction logic of an input field for filling form
  • [Form Autofill] Auto-create profiles based off submitted form data
  • [Form Autofill] Collect information on how much time users spent on page with forms (w/wo 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

• jjong landed a bunch of l10n fixes for the DateTime picker!

Privacy/Security

• johannh reports that the team is continuing permission prompts polish work:
• Nihanth changed the permission prompts for Desktop Notifications to always permanently save the permission (temporary push notifications doesn’t really make sense) instead of showing a pre-ticked checkbox by default.
• Nihanth also fixed a bug where notification and geolocation permission would not correctly swap to a new window
• Dao replaced the old fallback icon in the identity block with an SVG version
• Paolo fixed some edge cases around how PopupNotifications are displayed and hidden

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…
  • I wrote up how Sync tracks bookmark changes on Desktop.
  • Grisha wrote up how Android Sync works.

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
  • This notification is only displayed on Nightly
• 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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