Categories: News

These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 18

Highlights

Friends of the Firefox team

(Give a shoutout/thanks to people for helping fix and test bugs. Introductions)

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

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

Mobile

Photon

Performance
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
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
  • 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

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

Sync / Firefox Accounts

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.

One comment on “These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 18”

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  1. alexarnaud wrote on

    Dear all,

    as usual, I’m afraid to see no news about accessiblity. There are millions of people with disabilities all over the world and when I see no news from accessibility in report I assume no work has been made but I hope it’s not the reality.

    What we could do to improve the communication of the accessiblity team ? I’m a subscriber of the quiet accesiblity mailling list and a subscriber of the linux accessiblity bugs but without informations how could we have a QA team ?

    Cheers :).

    Reply

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