Highlights
- about:addons now has a legacy tag to show when an extension is not a WebExtension and addons.mozilla.org now specifically tags WebExtensions as compatible on Firefox 57!
- The Activity Stream Test Pilot now shows recommended stories from Pocket, and you can try the first bits of the Activity Stream integration in Firefox on Nightly by switching the pref browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.enabled

The new about:newtab featuring Activity Stream!
- Mike Conley published a new article on MDN: Performance best practices for Firefox front-end engineers
- Edouard Oger refactored the Sync UI code, resulting in some impressive Talos improvements for browser start-up and window opening
- The awesomebar now prefers https to http more often than before.
- The latest Firefox for iOS v7.x releases have resulted in a 60% decline of our crashes and have resolved many user reported issues!
Friends of the Firefox team
(Give a shoutout/thanks to people for helping fix and test bugs. Introductions)
- MattN would like to welcome to intern JonathanGB who will be working on form history improvements. He landed his first patch on day 1!
- Resolved bugs (excluding employees): https://mzl.la/2q0LGdq
- Avikalpa Kundu [:kalpa]
- Dan Banner
- Kevin Jones
- 🌟 Ashhar Hasan made it so that the password manager list doesn’t send you back to the top after a password is removed (13 year-old bug!)
- More than one bug fixed:
- New contributors (🌟 = First Patch!)
Project Updates
Add-ons
- The WebExtensions API browser.sessions.restore will now return an object instead of an array.
- Quite a few performance fixes including: localized message generation, stop calling getAddonById or getAddonList at startup, compiling scripts in a background thread
- browser.management.getAll and setEnabled for themes
- About:debugging for addons now shows the filesystem of the add-on
Electrolysis (e10s)
- gabor turned on the pre-allocated process manager, which should improve the perceived performance of opening tabs and windows in new processes
- mconley is currently fixing a regression in the tab switch spinner metric
- e10s-multi A/B test is currently underway on Beta
- e10s-a11y support still targeted for Firefox 55
Firefox Core Engineering
- Shield Study defaulting Flash to click-to-play (Plugin Safety) has begun on Release 53 and will run through June 15.
Form Autofill
- Sync is on schedule to ship with our MVP this year.
- Fixed a bunch of bugs:
- Add a new pseudo class for preview which highlight and change text color of form elements.
- Apply the field prediction heuristics for the elements added after DOMContentLoaded
- Rename “profiles” to “addresses” in the storage
- Add autofill name fields to the management/preferences UI
- Autofill preferences should appear before the master password ones
- Move form autofill preference to Forms & Passwords group
- Add mochitest for form autofill feature
- Implement the test fixtures for the top 12 web sites.
- Support full-name fields
- Support “address-line*” fields
- A utility library for handling full name and separated names
- Support name fields in profiles
- Profiles in the manage dialog should sort by last modified
Mobile
- Firefox for iOS v7.x
- Firefox iOS 7.1 has the following bugs fixed
- Firefox iOS 7.2 has the following bugs fixed
- Firefox iOS 7.3 has the following bugs fixed
- Firefox iOS 7.4 has the following bugs fixed
- Over the past few weeks we shipped a number of Firefox iOS bug fix releases to address quality issues:
- We are about to ship Firefox iOS 7.5 with two more important bug fixes and it will also include an experiment to promote Firefox Focus from within Firefox. This will most likely be the last of the 7.x releases. Here’s the bug list.
- Firefox for iOS v8.x
- The Firefox iOS 8.0 branch has been created
- Screenshots for Firefox iOS 8.0 have been made available to the L10N community
- We hope to make the first Firefox iOS 8.0 Beta available to our TestFlight audience this week
- We are on track to ship the first iteration of Mobile Activity Stream with this release
- Firefox Focus
- We have implemented a new mobile telemetry library, which will ship in Focus iOS 3.3 and will be used in Firefox iOS 9
- Focus Android 1.0 is nearing feature complete status
Photon
Performance
- We are working on deterministic perf tests for sync reflows and files loaded too early during startup
- Sync layout and style flush tests will be in browser/base/content/test/performance. When these become available, make sure to run these when you add Photon-y things!
- Expect big patches to land to stop using Task.jsm in browser/ and toolkit/, and stop using the non standard Promise.defer from promise.jsm
- If you have WIP patches for these folders, consider landing them soon to avoid bitrot.
Animation
- Looks like we now have SVG sprites for the various animations, will begin putting the animations in to the browser
- Jaws landed code to transition the selected tab to its destination when reordering tabs
- The old download indicator – the seconds countdown and progressbar in the toolbar – was kept around when the new arrow-style indicator landed. It is now gone as we prepare for photon changes.
Visuals
- Nihanth changed all our toolbar button icons to use SVGs! 🎉🎉🎉🎉
- Johann shared our toolbarbutton code between platforms and we had a bit of fallout to fix
- Johann increased the spacing of context menu items when accessed through touch.
- Dao refreshed the about:privatebrowsing design for Photon
- Dao updated our toolbarbuttons to be 16×16 px instead of 18×18
Onboarding
- Fischer and Rex and Fred report that the team has been iterating on the overlay prototype for the onboarding experience
- The team is in discussions with the Activity Stream team to figure out how the overlay will integrate with the Activity Stream page
- The team is also sorting out integration with Firefox Account log-in, and Automigration
- The onboarding overlay experience is currently being developed as a system add-on
Preferences
- timdream reports that the team has almost finished scoping out the work for this project, and that this wiki page is a great way to track the team as they work
- Please file about:preferences bugs! Preferably blocking the right meta bugs.
Privacy/Security
- jkt is looking into rewriting containers to use WebExtensions instead of the Addon SDK
- Our three Outreachy interns for May 30 – August 30 were announced last week:
- Prathiksha G – Site Permission Management UI 🎉
- Princiya Marina Sequeira & Bianca Danforth – Upgrade Lightbeam 🎉
Project Mortar (PDFium)
- The team is still working on landing the HUGE patches of Chromium PDFium source code into m-c.
- PDF printing integration is ongoing.
- JSPlugin architecture is broken by lately m-c changes, Peterv is fixing.
Search
- A new SHIELD study for unifying the search and location bars went live.
- Some Places, bookmarks and one-off search fixes.
- Some followups around hi-res favicons.
Sync / Firefox Accounts
- We’re modernizing the codebase with async functions. This should eventually get unrelated Sync code out of profiler stacks.
Test Pilot
- We are working on integrating Screenshots into Firefox 54. There are some final perf issues with Talos tests and some work still remaining to get tests working. Special thanks to Mark Banner and Kris Maglione for their help.
- We are working to graduate experiments or migrate to WebExtensions before the Addon SDK deprecation in Firefox 57.
- A News Feed feature is coming to the Test Pilot website soon, check out the designs.
- MacOS hackers: We need help with a Min Vid windowing bug (the player doesn’t always stay always-on-top): https://github.com/meandavejustice/min-vid/issues/619
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.
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