Categories: News

These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 20

Headlines

Friends of the Firefox team

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

Project Updates

Add-ons

Activity Stream

Electrolysis (e10s)

Firefox Core Engineering

  • We have a sample of top crashers (by signature) from FF53 release crash pings (not reports), for 5/19-5/25, broken down by process type. Some interesting things there, sent to the stability@ list for further investigation.
  • Updates to 64-bit begin in FF56 (stub installer introduced this in FF55).
  • About to land: LZMA compression and SHA384 support for update downloads for FF56, reducing the size of the download and improving its security.

Form Autofill

Mobile

  • We’re working hard to ship Android Activity Stream in Firefox for Android 57!
  • We’ve got a working draft of an open-source Android library that will allow you to log into your Firefox Sync account and download your bookmarks, history, and passwords. Check it out here.
  • Firefox Focus for Android v1.0 shipped one week before the all hands and v1.1 will be coming shortly, featuring full screen videos! Here’s the full v1.1 bug list
  • We are working on some UI refresh in Firefox for Android 57 to align the Firefox Desktop! Follow along in this bug.
  • We are also planning to phase out the support of Android 4.0 (API 15). Hoping to do this in Fennec 56. Here’s the tracking bug.

Photon

Performance

Structure

  • Built the prototype for adding the ability for the user to pin frequently-used items from the Page Action menu into the URL bar. This work adds a context menu to items in the action menu to control this. The prototype also added Page Action menu entries for Pocket and Screenshots (and as a next step, their existing buttons in the navbar will be removed). Eventually there will be an WebExtensions API so that Addons can extend this menu (but that work may not make 57).

    The context menu for the page action menu to pin actions to the URL bar

    Coming soon!

  • The bookmark star has moved into the URL bar. This (as with Pocket and Screenshots, mentioned above) is part of our work to consolidate actions you perform with the page into the Page Action menu.
  • The sidebar button is now in the toolbar by default. This gives easy one-click access to toggle the sidebar.
  • Customize Mode got a few updates. Its general style has been refreshed for Photon, and we’ve removed the “grid” style around the edges and shrinking-animation when opened. Also, the info panel that’s shown the first time a user enters customization mode (which helps explain that you can drag’n’drop items to move them around) has been replaced with a Photon critter – the Dragondrop. I hope you can appreciate this delightfully terrible pun. 😉

    The visual pun shown in the overflow menu when it is empty.

    Dragondrop! Get it?! Ba-dum-tish!

  • The Library panel will now show Bookmarks and Downloads. (Bookmarks are already in Nightly, Downloads was built during the week but needs more work before landing).
  • We also fixed a number of random polish bugs here and there. “Polish” bugs are changes that are not implementing new features, but are just fixing smaller issues with new or existing features. We’ll be seeing an increasing amount of these as we get closer to shipping, and focus on improving polish and quality overall.)

Animation

Visuals

Onboarding

Preferences

Search and Navigation

Sync / Firefox Accounts

Test Pilot (written only)

  • Page Shot, Activity Stream, Tab center, Pulse all graduated from Test Pilot
  • New experiments coming next week
  • We started a new blog to publish experiment results.  Watch https://medium.com/firefox-test-pilot for new posts soon

Web Payments

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.

8 comments on “These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 20”

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  1. Panda wrote on

    This text at the end “Here are the raw meeting notes that were used to derive this list.”,
    links to the previous meeting notes, instead of the newest ones. Here are the newest ones.
    https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Meeting/18-Jul-2017

    Reply

    1. mconley wrote on

      Thanks! Fixed!

      Reply

  2. klop*cz wrote on

    Thank you for the issue. It is nice to read it. Keep going 🙂 Firefox is becoming faster than ever with these all changes. I can’t remember when Nightly was slow last time. Thumbs up.

    Reply

  3. Alex Vincent wrote on

    Re: dragon drop: http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20080817

    Reply

  4. Sören Hentzschel wrote on

    Hi,

    the flexible space is not flexible at all (it has a fixed width). Is there already a bug filed to make it flexible where I can follow the progress?

    And why does the touch density option does not exist on macOS? There *are* touch display tablets which are compatible with macOS so there is really no reason not to offer this option to users of macOS.

    Thank you for all your work.

    Reply

    1. Johann Hofmann wrote on

      Hi Sören,

      > the flexible space is not flexible at all (it has a fixed width). Is there already a bug filed to make it flexible where I can follow the progress?

      I don’t think there is a bug, but I thought the flexible space is called “flexible” not because you can stretch it but because it resizes based on the number of items in the toolbar. You can drag multiple flexible spaces into the toolbar. Feel free to open a bug to get in touch with the folks that implemented it.

      > And why does the touch density option does not exist on macOS? There *are* touch display tablets which are compatible with macOS so there is really no reason not to offer this option to users of macOS.

      So far I don’t think anyone was aware that there is any kind of touch support on Mac. Again, feel free to make a bug and we’ll take the proposal seriously. One one hand, it’s cheap to just enable the option, on the other hand it might confuse (you will admit) the vast majority of Mac users that don’t have a touch screen.

      Thank you for your feedback!

      Reply

  5. Christina wrote on

    Since I’m having problem it would be helpful if there could be a version of Firefox Nightly that is a debugger version of Firefox Nightly 64 bit…like they have for VLC Nightly and Adobe Flash for Firefox encase your windows is to buggy to use the non debugger version or… some 64 bit version of Firefox Nightly that I could use on my Windows 10 creators update laptop. And my problem is…
    This is still happening and I tried to reinstall Firefox Nightly. But reinstalling Firefox Nightly did not help fix the problem. The problem still persists.
    I have windows 10 creators update still can’t update my Firefox Nightly 64 bit 2017-04-18-03-02-20-mozilla-central.zip 64bit for desktop to the latest update and or any update past Firefox Nightly 64 bit 2017-04-18-03-02-20-mozilla-central.zip Of Firefox Nightly 64bit for desktop. Because when I do it will only show up on windows 10 creators update safe mode desktop. In normal mode where any update pasted update 2017-04-18-03-02-20-mozilla-central.zip 64bit and the lasted update of Firefox Nightly 64bit for desktop will not show up on the normal desktop it will only show up as background processes. And it keep not showing up on the normal desktop every time and not just once.

    Reply

  6. coreyjakob wrote on

    Don’t remove support for Android 4.0.4, please

    Reply

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