These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 18

Highlights

• The datetime picker has been enabled by default on Nightly! Please test and report bugs

  • 

    Behold!

• Firefox Screenshots is in Nightly and enabled by default!  Take a shot of something. Report bugs if you find them please.

  • 

    Snip out some of the web for your collection.

• Firefox 54 will ship with 4 content processes. \o/
• johannh added new compact and touch modes (that are independent of themes). They can be triggered through setting browser.uidensity to 1 or 2 in about:config. Setting these will be exposed in the customize mode UI eventually.
• WebExtension dynamic theme-ing API has been enabled by default on Nightly, and will be riding the trains out to release! Here’s a blog post about the API.
• You can now swap the sidebar to the opposite side of the window.

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/2qRLxZ7
    • Avikalpa Kundu [:kalpa]
    • Dan Banner
    • Raajit Raj(:raajitr)
    • Santiago Paez [:tiago]
    • flyingrub
    • tfe
  • New contributors (🌟 = First Patch!)
    • 🌟 Alejandro Rodriguez Salamanca cleaned up some of our Telemetry code!
    • 🌟 junderx fixed a bug in how the Page Info dialog reports image dimensions!
    • Raajit Raj(:raajitr) cleaned up a spurious warning when processing Histograms.json, and also added some improved strictness to the Histograms.json schema
    • 🌟udara.weera got rid of some extra error logging when disconnecting Firefox Account devices!

Project Updates

Add-ons

• Many performance improvements in WebExtension start up from working with Screenshots team. Most of these have been documented by Ehsan, but check out bug 1363905 for more detail.
• Support for Implement support for $0 and inspect bindings in devtools.inspectedWindow.eval has landed which means some of the large developer tools add-ons (React, Redux, Ember) etc from Chrome should now be working on Firefox 55! Check out this tweet.
• devtools.panels.themeName support has landed
• browser_style is now available in browser actions, options UI and the sidebar

Activity Stream

• Check out the Activity Stream Newsletter sent to firefox-dev for the latest updates!

Firefox Core Engineering

• Just started week 4 of the Flash Shield Study. Nightly 55 has click-to-activate (CTA) as the default setting. Beta 55 will see a gradual rollout of CTA, though domain blocking will be active for everyone.
• Startup crashes from BaseThreadInitThunk has been fixed in 55. This prevents early DLL injection by third parties in some cases (which is against policy anyway), so check that bug if you’re dealing with an injection-related crash.

Form Autofill

• Fixed the following bugs:
  • [Form Autofill] Auto-create new profiles based off submitted form data
    • Off by default until the first time use doorhanger is ready
  • Helper functions for summarizing field names into groups in FormAutofillUtils.
  • Implement the first version of heuristic algorithm.
    • Off by default. Flip extensions.formautofill.heuristics.enabled to try it.
  • Field Prediction Heuristics for select element.
  • Populate select elements with form autofill profile data

Mobile

• As part of “make sync better” efforts, landed Sync Ping in Fennec Nightly, which should provide a telemetry about the health of Sync on FxAndroid.

Photon

Performance

• mconley has landed even more tests for sync reflows, the Photon menu and its subview transitions are now covered, along with window closing, and tab resizing during opening and closing
• We now have a test checking which JS components and modules are loaded at which phase of startup, and started taking things off app-startup.

Structure

• The hamburger panel is now feature-complete! (minor caveat: the library subview is shared with the library button, which is not feature-complete yet)
• The page action menu now has a bookmark item (as well as the synced tabs subview)
  • Still to come: Pocket & Screenshots
• There’s a veeeeery-initial library button + panel available now. Probably not worth testing yet, but it’s available in the palette.
• Greening up tests so we can flip the photon structure pref by default on nightly builds.

Animation

• Jared landed bug 1364221 which allows us to run more animations on the compositor for added smoothness.
• Jared is getting close in bug 1355924 to adding an animation for the refresh/stop button
• Sam is working in bug 1352065 to implement a new download animation.
• Jim is working on a new tab loading indicator in bug 1352119.

Visuals

• There is now less drag space at the top of the tab strip. It’s in front of the first tab, instead.
• Dao gave the Windows 10 title bar a fresh coat of paint.
• Dao also removed the drop down marker on bookmark toolbar folders across platforms.
• Nihanth is working on the new sidebar styling
• Dale is working on updating the identity block design

Onboarding

• Fischer submitted the review request for bug 1369750 to fix the intermittent issue of accessing the window object inside the onboarding.js framescript
• Fischer has also gotten review feedback from MattN on a bug to make sure we detect old profiles more accurately
• Fred has finished creating the message architecture so that the Auto-migration code can talk with Activity Stream
• Fred and Rex enabled the basic onboarding overlay on about:newtab and about:home. Now can see a little fox icon on the top-left corner on about:newtab and about:home on Nightly! Here’s the spec
• Rex submitted the review request for Bug 1357046; this patch will add the Private Browsing tour and the Search tour in the onBoarding overlay
• Evelyn reports that the plan is to release the new onboarding flow in Firefox 56

Preferences

• The Performance section of about:preferences has had all P1 bugs fixed, and is ready for testing. The plan is to ship this in Firefox 55 in the “old” about:preferences organization.
• Have landed bugs for updating strings in about:preferences
  • Spec
• The team is working on improving search highlighting in about:preferences to include sub-dialogs and fixing some highlight/tooltip glitches.
• Here’s the updated about:preferences re-org spec that we’re aiming to ship in Firefox 56. It’s very close to being finalized. The spec for Search behaviour is also being finalized.

Platform Audibles

• The Simplify Page feature in Print Preview has been enabled by default in Firefox 55 for Windows
  • Big shout out to mlongaray from HP who has been working hard on this

Project Mortar (PDFium)

• JSPlugin architecture is now in m-c! (hooray!)
• Given that all facts pointing out Pepper API isn’t future-proof, the team is re-evaluating how to integrate PDFium without Pepper API layer.

Search

• QA for one-off buttons and search suggestions in the Location Bar is ongoing
• Fixed some bugs found by QA
• Some misc fixes to the Location Bar and some more correctness fixes to Favicons
• Preparation work to run future Unified Location Bar preference-based Shield studies
• Shipped a system add-on in release to add telemetry for follow-on searches. Working on landing it in m-c, too.

Sync / Firefox Accounts

• :eoger landed improvements to the “send tab to device” experience in Photon

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.