Highlights
- Form Autofill is enabled-by-default in Nightly! Give it a try by manually creating an address profile in about:preferences.
- Photon Engineering Newsletter #1 went out last week, #2 coming later today!
- Flash is now Click-to-Play by default on Nightly! It also favors html5 video content over Flash content. Check out this video! We are running a Shield Study on this to fine-tune our blocklist with the goal of sending this to the release audience in Firefox 55.
- A streamlined stub installer for Windows is shipping in 55:
- A bunch of primary UI changes as part of Photon landed in Nightly in the last two weeks:
- Dao detached the back, forward and reload/stop buttons from the urlbar
- Dale implemented the new location and search bar design
- Nihanth implemented the new toolbar button hover and active background styles and increased the vertical padding of the toolbar buttons
- Nihanth also implemented a new back button design.
- mconley has kicked off the first episode The Joy of Profiling, which is a weekly video series on performance profile analysis. Got a slow Firefox? Submit Gecko Profiler profiles here!
Friends of the Firefox team
(Give a shoutout/thanks to people for helping fix and test bugs. Introductions)
- Resolved bugs (excluding employees):
- More than one bug fixed: https://mzl.la/2rwO12P
- Dan Banner
- Kevin Jones
- Milind L (:milindl)
- Swapnesh Kumar Sahoo [:swapneshks]
- tfe
- New contributors (🌟 = First Patch!)
- 🌟 jomer14 got rid of some leftover l10n files that Firefox Accounts didn’t need anymore!
- 🌟 Pauline got rid of PlacesUtils.asyncGetBookmarkIds (which isn’t needed anymore thanks to Bookmarks.jsm), which also reduced our memory footprint!
- 🌟 Shashwat Jolly cleaned up some of our strings in about:license!
- More than one bug fixed: https://mzl.la/2rwO12P
Project Updates
Activity Stream
- ‘Graduation’ team is getting close to preffing on Activity Stream in Nightly and working on Search Suggestions, about:home, cleaning up tests, and perf telemetry
- Aiming for more regular / weekly landings from github to mozilla-central
- Replaced custom React search suggestions from Test Pilot with existing contentSearchUI used for about:home/about:newtab simplifying tests
- Test Pilot team is finishing up customization (drag’n’drop, add/edit topsite), as well as beginning work on Sections
- Activity Stream, when enabled on m-c runs in the content process!
- Removed most of Content Services / Suggested Tiles code from about:newtab resulting in perf improvements and removed / ~8x fewer intermittent test failures
Electrolysis (e10s)
- The e10s-multi team is still looking over the data being gathered from the Beta population against the release criteria to determine whether or not e10s-multi will ship in Firefox 54, or will have to wait until Firefox 55
- e10s-a11y support in Firefox 55 has been marked “at risk” due to stability issues. A go/no-go will be happen no later than June 3rd
- erahm has a blog post about how memory usage with 4 content processes continues to be the sweet spot
Firefox Core Engineering
- Reminder: Firefox 55 is also installing 64-bit by default on 64-bit OS’s; updates will come later.
- Resolved race condition in Rust runtime. This may have been bugging some tests (no pun intended).
- We have preliminary top crashers lists from crash stacks sent via crash pings. Expanding that analysis is pending review of the data & correlation with crash reports.
Form Autofill
- Lots of focus was on a linux64 Talos startup regression which is now resolved by making various pieces of autofill initialization lazier. This slowed down other landings in order to not add other noise.
- Form Autofill bugs that were resolved this week:
- Enable Form Autofill by default on Nightly
- Rename formautofill preference prefix and address pref suffix
- Add a chrome-only API to preview the option to be auto-selected in a <select>
- [Form Autofill] autofill’s autocomplete popup filtering is broken
- Support feature detection on autocomplete attribute
- [Form Autofill] Implement the credit-card storage
- profileStorage.get should return null instead of throwing, and .add should return the newly created guid.
- Add SchemaVersion for each record in ProfileStorage
- [Form Autofill] Dismiss preview highlight if the filled fields is being changed
Photon
Performance
- More rigorous reflow tests have landed for window opening, tab opening and tab closing.
- More tests coming up for windows and tabs, and the AwesomeBar
- Kudos to the Structure / Menus team for making the subview animations smooth as silk! (Notice that Oh no! Reflow! is detecting no synchronous reflows in that video)
- Task.jsm and Promise.defer() removal big patches landed as pre-announced during the last meeting. This covered the browser/ and toolkit/ folders, more patches coming soon for other folders.
Structure
- The page action menu has started taking shape and now has items to copy/email links, and will soon have a ‘send to device’ submenu;
- Tomorrow’s nightly will have Firefox Account and cut/copy/paste items in the main hamburger panel;
- Main work on the permanent overflow panel (as a replacement for the customizable bits of the existing hamburger panel) is done, working on polish and bugfixes;
- Work will start on the new library button this week;
- We’ll be working to flip the photon pref by default on Nightly in the next week or two;
Animation
- Patches going through review for download animation and refresh/stop animations.
- Working on getting toolbarbutton icons to scale up on press
- A patch to run more of our animations on the compositor bounced but should get landed again today.
Visuals
- We changed a bunch of stuff! See the highlights for details.
- Johann is working on compact and touch modes.
Onboarding
- The Automigration workflow screencast
- UX spec for Activity Stream is in progress
- The UI part will be done separately in Activity Stream
- Skeleton of onboarding overlay system add-on is under review with Mossop
- This is a skeleton without tours. Tours will be landed in follow-up bugs.
- Screencast
- Under discussion about onboarding tour’s update between different versions.
Preferences
- Search is taking shape on Nightly! It now comes with the right highlight color, tooltips for sub-dialog search results. With the help from QA engineers, we are closing the gap between implementation & spec.
- UX team asked us to revise re-org. The change will likely postpone re-org shipping by one release (to 56); the good news is the release population will be presented with the new search & re-org at the same time, if that happens.
Project Mortar (PDFium)
- peterv made some progress of the JSPlugin architecture – the last few pieces of work are reviewing. Hopefully this is the final round of review, and we will land all of them (8 patches!) soon.
Search
- One-off buttons in the location bar are ready to ride the trains in 55.
- Search suggestions are now enabled by default. Users who had explicitly opted out of search suggestions in the past, will not see them.
- Hi-res favicon improvements: the default globe favicon is now hi-res (SVG) everywhere in the UI and some ugly icon rescaling was fixed.
Sync / Firefox Accounts
- Form autofill sync engine in progress. Sync team working with MattN, seanlee, and lchang on profile reconciliation
- New sync engine checkboxes for autofill profiles and credit card data coming to Preferences
- juwei is working on opt-in UX
- Removing nested event loops from Sync!
Test Pilot
- Containers experiment release 2.3.0 coming this week
- Screenshots feature is now aiming for 55
- We’re hoping WebExtensions start-up will be performant enough by 55
- Our backup plan: move UI (toolbar button, context menu item) into bootstrap.js code, lazy-load WebExtension on click
- We’re planning to start a Test Pilot blog (with help from Marketing)
- Test Pilot and experiments are moving away from the SDK
Looking into replacing Test Pilot addon functionality with a WebExtension API Experiment (learn more)
Here are the raw meeting notes that were used to derive this list.
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