These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 19

Highlights

• The Photon structure pref has been flipped on Nightly. Photon menus / customization etc. are now the default configuration on Nightly. See dolske’s blog post.

The new hamburger menu

• We populated the onboarding overlay on about:newtab according to the UI spec. There are 5 tours with call-to-action buttons & you can hide the tour with a checkbox.

The new onboarding panel

• The stub installer is shipping in Firefox 55, and defaults to 64-bit for 64-bit OSes as of 55, provided it has sufficient memory. (Updating to 64-bit from 32-bit is aiming to follow suit in 56.)
• The reorganized preferences page is shipping in Firefox 56! Also, the search input in preferences has been enabled by default!
• Recent perf work in the Location Bar code is showing interesting gains in the time to return the first result (source)

Mean!

• Firefox Focus is now available for Android!
• We’re officially shipping e10s-multi to eligible users in Firefox 54! We’ll soon be expanding it to users with WebExtensions installed via a system add-on update as well.

Friends of the Firefox team

• johannh wants to introduce Prathiksha [:prathiksha], our new Outreachy intern who is working on permission management in about:preferences and other permission-related bugs.
• mikedeboer wants to introduce Bao Quan [:beekill], the sessionstore GSoC intern this year! 👋
• Resolved bugs (excluding employees): https://mzl.la/2ry91mG
  • More than one bug fixed:
    • Iaroslav Sheptykin
    • Jeongkyu Kim
    • Santiago Paez [:tiago]
    • Tomislav Jovanovic :zombie
    • UK92
  • New contributors (🌟 = First Patch!)
    • 🌟 Perry Jiang [:perry] fixed the broken Preferences button for Flash when it’s set to Never Activate! And with an automated test, too! And it got uplifted to beta!
    • 🌟 meet1995 implemented History.hasVisits, also with an automated test!

Project Updates

Add-ons

• chrome_settings_overrides now allows an extension to add a search engine to Firefox (but not change the default search engine).
• downloads.open() now requires user interaction.
• privacy.websites.referrersEnabled landed, allowing an extension to enable or disable referrers.
• Methods for getting information about installed extensions (management.get() and management.getAll()) as well as events for onEnabled, onDisabled, onInstalled and onUninstalled were all enabled for regular extensions in addition to themes.
• Updated WebExtensions code to put things in the permanent area in the overflow panel instead of the hamburger menu.
• A browser.menus namespace was added which becomes an alias for the browser.contextMenus namespace. This was added because we are in the process of adding APIs to add items to the main menu in addition to context menus.
• Support for ws and wss protocols were added to the webRequest API.
• WebExtension experiments are now allowed on release, however they need to be signed by AMO. This will be used by TestPilot to migrate away from the add-on SDK and replace unimplemented APIs with experiments.
• 57 release is 7 weeks away, at which point we will be disabling all add-ons except WebExtensions on Nightly. This doesn’t include internally signed legacy add-ons.

Activity Stream

• June 15th Newsletter
• Highlights:
  • Graduation Team has landed the about:newtab Preferences Pane, put in place a bunch of performance telemetry, and made some amazing progress on making sure all existing Firefox about:newtab tests pass.
  • The MVP Team has built out controls for collapsing/expanding AS sections, as well as landed the very cool ‘Recent Bookmarks’ section.
    • This iteration, we will be preffing on a minimal version of Activity Stream in Firefox Nightly!

  • 

    The Activity Stream Release Schedule

  • Shield Study to examine AS vs. Tiles starting June 26th

Electrolysis (e10s)

• Windows support for e10s+accessibility has been delayed until Firefox 56+ due to stability issues. Here’s the meta bug for the project. This bug appears to be the major blocker.

Firefox Core Engineering

• Flash is set to click-to-activate (CTA) by default as of 55
• Preliminary top crashers lists from crash stacks, broken down by process type, sent via crash pings on release 53+ is blocked on Spark (or user) errors until further notice.

Form Autofill

• You can read a summary of the recent updates in this email

Note the neat form fill preview!

• We enabled the heuristics algorithm. Form Autofill now supports forms without @autocomplete attributes, i.e. most en-US sites.
• Enabled the auto-save feature and implemented the door hanger for notifying users of this.
• Landed preview & highlight feature. You can now preview how addresses will be filled in multiple fields.
• Landed the footer in the suggestion dropdown, which makes users easier to find the preferences page.
• Landed basic select element support.
• Polished the dialogs in about:preferences (two-layer in-content dialog and select element dropmark).

Photon

Performance

• • mconley is looking at Talos regressions
    • Fixed the sessionrestore tests so that they don’t accidentally test the wrong thing
    • Fixing Talos profiling in automation for (at least) pageloader tests
    • Have a partial explanation for recent regressions on tps in automation, still figuring out the rest.
  • paolo reports that we have full parity of native Promises with Promise.jsm now that unhandled rejections of native Promises cause browser-chrome tests to fail.
    • We can stop worrying about losing test coverage when removing uses of Promise.jsm and Task.jsm from mozilla-central, and we can make Task.jsm use native Promises internally for add-ons that still use it.
    • Failures in the browser-chrome suite will be logged in the same way as the xpcshell suite, with the messages:
      • A promise chain failed to handle a rejection
      • Unable to find a rejection expected by expectUncaughtRejection

• • Some existing failures are whitelisted using PromiseTestUtils.expectUncaughtRejection, but new failures often just denote a missing “.catch(Cu.reportError);” at the end of a Promise chain. A new ESLint rule will help detecting these cases, after we’ve converted the deprecated usage of .then(null, …) to the recommended .catch(…).
• florian’s been improving our start-up times:
  • browser_startup.js is a test everybody should know about, see this mail about improving start-up time that florian sent to firefox-dev
  • We delayed initialization of Places, NSS, Task.jsm (still pending reviews), and the search service. They no longer block first paint.

Structure

• Sidebar button changes have landed – button now just toggles the sidebar
  • One known issue with the button looking checked on startup being tracked – patch has r+, should be fixed soon.
• Library panel now has a pocket list item and looks more polished. The synced tabs view also got a small update.
• Panels now scroll correctly when necessary.
• Coming soon: more updates to the library panel, page action panel, and moving the bookmarks star (back) to the URL bar.

Animation

• Photon-themed download icon landed, work is underway on a new revised download animation
• Arrow-panel animations hope to land this week
• Stop/refresh animation getting close, going through review now and looking at Talos issues
• Tab loading indicator looking at fixing Talos issues

Visuals

• Thanks to UK92 for contributing several patches to photon-visual in the last weeks:
  • Updated about:about
  • Updated about:rights
  • Made the window control buttons span the entire height of the tabstrip in Windows 10
• Nihanth implemented new styling for the header and search box of the bookmarks and history sidebars.
• Johann made Firefox Touch mode (browser.uidensity=2) automatically enable itself in Windows Tablet Mode (can be turned off).
• On OSX we’re experiencing some jumping in the tab strip if the user maximizes the window or goes fullscreen. Dao fixed part one of the problem (the maximizing) and we’ll have to figure out the fullscreen issue.
• The title bar will be colored by default on macOS (> Yosemite) from tomorrow’s Nightly (if it sticks).
• Dale is working on the new identity block appearance and updating the toolbar background colors on OS X and Windows.

Onboarding

• The Sync tour and tour notification will land soon.

Preferences

• Re-org v2 is being actively worked on

Search

• More polish work on search suggestions and one-off buttons in the Location Bar. Both features are on-track to be released in version 55
• A User Research experiment is ongoing on a Firefox version without a search bar, through an ad-hoc experimental add-on.
• The follow-on Search Add-on is now also enabled in Beta and Nightly. Some performance issues have been hammered.
• Follow-up work to Photon startup perf improvements by Florian: working on a patch to delay the whole Places connection opening to its first use, to improve cold startup times.
• The Bookmarks backups are now restored using the asynchronous bookmarking API.
• Fixing some crash issues in Storage and Places
• Worked with community volunteers to replace some synchronous history APIs.

Test Pilot

• A new version of Firefox Screenshots landed in Nightly last night with some nice bug fixes
• Tab Center only works up to Firefox 55
  • Currently best alternative is Tab Center Redux, but it’s not perfect
• Graduating July 5th:  Page Shot, Activity Stream
• Graduating “soon” after July 5th:  Pulse, Tab Center
• Keep your eyes open for three new experiments coming mid-July!