These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 21

Highlights

• The App Updater is now using LZMA compression and SHA384 for signing. The release of builds taking advantage of this should be unthrottled today. So far, complete update files are reduced from 19-21%.
• Three new Test Pilot experiments launched today!
  • Voice Fill allows you to do web searches with your voice and your microphone!
  • Notes gives you a notepad in your sidebar!
  • Send allows you to share file upload links that automatically self-destruct after the first download!
• The file size is shown again for completed downloads in the downloads panel
• Titlebar vibrancy (translucency effect) on Mac OS has just landed (ignore the square tabs – that hasn’t landed yet)

  • 

    Ooooh, how vibrant

• You can now put items that are in the page action menu in the URL bar permanently!
• daleharvey updated us to delicious new dark theme colors.

  • 

    Looking slick!

• New animations for bookmarking and Pocket’ing!

  • 

    Tremendous!

Friends of the Firefox team

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

• Resolved bugs (excluding employees): https://mzl.la/2vpwyMc
  • More than one bug fixed:
    • Alejandro Rodriguez Salamanca
    • Bao Quan [:beekill]
    • Luciano I
    • Tomislav Jovanovic :zombie
    • Tushar Saini (:shatur)
    • flyingrub
  • New contributors (🌟 = First Patch!)
    • 🌟Luciano I tweaked the size and the style of the Firefox Accounts avatar in about:preferences!
    • 🌟Nicolas Ouellet-Payeur made it so that we always wrap thrown strings with Error objects in our Sync code!
• jonathanGB’s internship presentation @ 1:15pm PDT today
  • Form autofill & WebPayments

Project Updates

Add-ons

• Warnings are now displayed from startup of an extension installed via about:debugging.
• The devtools.panels.elements.onSelectionChanged event is now supported.
• We’ve started landing parts of the browsingData API on Android including settings and removeCookies.
• Improved WebExtensions performance by storing and transferring schema JSON in structured clone blobs.
• Added a new API to allow extensions to add a preface to the window title.
• Extensions can now add an item to the “Tools” menu in a manner similar to how extensions add items to the context menu.
• Tab objects returned from an API call now include a lastAccessed property.

Activity Stream

• Activity Stream will be pref’ed off by default in 56 Beta, and will be successively rolled out from 1%, 5% to 10% of the Beta population using Shield pref flips
• Default Top Sites landing for Tier 1 and Tier 2 countries with global fallback
• Pocket will be enabled by geo/locale for Canada and US initially, Germany will be added during 57 Nightly and tested in 56 Beta
• Snippets, Profile Migration, Onboarding Tour recently landed in 56

Electrolysis (e10s)

• Content process preallocator has been disabled while the team coordinates with the Activity Stream team on the preloaded about:newtab browser.

Firefox Core Engineering

• App Updater
  • Reminder: Updates to 64-bit begin in FF56, so you can look for that on Nightly now.
  • We have pulled the Update Agent (which continues the download of the update file in the background) from 57. Earliest it would be now is 58.
• Installer
  • To support onboarding, we’re adding an option for users to clean up their profile if they’ve had an old version of Firefox installed before. This is aimed for 57.
• Crashes/Stability
  • Carl Corcoran (ccorcoran) and Gabriele Svelto (gsvelto) are close to landing CFI-based stackwalking support.
  • We’re going to block 3rd party applications that use our accessibility APIs.
  • …and addressing an issue with early injection (confidential bug due to security).
• Hang Reporting
  • Doug Thayer (dthayer) is working with mystor and smaug on how to make the BHR dashboard more useful. This is part of the “BHR Taskforce” with DOM.

Form Autofill

• The Form Autofill bugs fixed this week were mostly about credit card support, sync, l10n, pref refinements, US split telephone fields and performance.
  • [Form Autofill] Manage Profiles and Edit Profile dialogs refinements
  • [Form Autofill] Implement the infrastructure of Telephone parser to support the various combination of telephone fields
  • [Form Autofill] Change the label “country” to “country or region” in Preferences
  • [Form Autofill] Move the strings in manageProfiles and editProfile dialog to .properties file
  • Intermittent browser/extensions/formautofill/test/browser/browser_update_doorhanger.js | Uncaught exception – undefined – timed out after 50 tries.
  • [Form Autofill] Update the locale of phishing warning note to align with the latest UX spec
  • Add “sync tracker” support to ProfileStorage
  • [Form Autofill] Support two fieldDetails array for Address and Credit Card feature in FormAutofillHandler.
  • [Form Autofill] Collect information about the count of autofill being applied in different scenario
  • [Form Autofill] Add the ability for “startSearch” to retrieve credit card profiles from storage
  • Implement core reconciliation logic for formautofill engine
  • [Form Autofill] Setting manuallyManagedState bit might trigger frame re-construction and erase the preview text while previewing
  • [Form Autofill] Trigger autofill broken on 3 fields forms
  • [Form Autofill] Extend ProfileAutoCompleteResult to support credit cards
  • Autofill doesn’t work when using drag to new window
  • [Form Autofill] Replace the strings “profile” with “address” in preferences
  • Support non-experimental autocomplete pref
  • [Form Autofill] Exception occurs when saving a telephone number like “1234567”
  • [Form Autofill] Refine the warning message in preferences
  • [Form Autofill] Implement credit card profile creation in FormAutofillHandler
  • [Form Autofill] Group tel-related fields when calculating the secondary label
  • Cache the matching result of select elements so we don’t need to calculate it every time when previewing and filling

Mobile

• The still-in-development Activity Stream for Android will soon be enabled for all users on Nightly in order to gather feedback
• Tushar (Google Summer of Code Student) wrote a blog post about adding new WebExtension APIs to Firefox for Android
• Mobile Marketing Automation using Leanplum will be enabled on Firefox for Android 56 beta.
  • This project is to help users discover more features about Firefox for Android to see how that impacts retention. Documents for data collection and hypothesis / campaign

Photon

We’re very close (and on track!) to our feature-complete target date of August 7th. There are still a few key things incoming, but we are starting to shift towards bug-fixing and polish instead of adding whole new features.

Performance

• A patch to switch the tab strip to using CSS smooth-scroll (and eliminating some sync reflows in the process), has been reviewed and is waiting for the merge before landing on central.
• There are now some basic reflow tests for showing results in the AwesomeBar
• A patch to switch to the next tab earlier when removing a tab is waiting for review, and should shave a few milliseconds off of tab switch time.
• mconley is starting to work on a patch to “warm up” tabs speculatively when we think we’re going to switch to them.
• Perry is working on removing the context menu CPOWs and making the thumbnailer less aggressive

Structure

• We’ll be adding support for pocket and screenshots there soon.
• Mike updated the history portion of the library button to declutter it and show more history items.
• The overflow panel is now much prettier!

Animation

• The Save to Pocket and the Bookmark animation landed. Reminder that you do not need to sign up for an account to use Pocket, just click through the tutorial and it will start letting you save pages to Pocket.
• Further refinements on the toolbar button animations [1] [2]
• New arrow-panel animations are up for review, looks like all test failures are now fixed.
• The new Download notifications animation got r+ and should land after the merge
• The new tab loading/progress indicator is going through review passes

Visuals

• Dao is putting square tabs in your Nightly, soon…. ☜[ヮﾟ☜]
• Johann increased the size of all Photon-style menus when accessed through touch.
• Dao updated the tab strip icons and threw away a lot of PNGs.
• And a lot of small fixes and tweaks, such as fine-tuning the Windows accent color text, sharper sidebar tree icons, correctly sorting the UI density options, coloring the titlebar in Mac OS customize mode, fixing the identity block hover state and much more.

Onboarding

• Going through P3 bugs for the 56 release and working on them.
  • Accessibility bugs wasn’t an original requirement but we have decided to make them high priority P3s. Will uplift to beta as they being completed.
• Copy for the 57 release has been confirmed – we’re just waiting for illustrations. WIP patches ready to be have the illustrations put into them.

Preferences

• Performance section on Preferences was found to have confusing behavior because of how e10s rollout changes user default. Bug 1382649 landed and was uplifted to beta last week to deal with it.
• Preferences Re-org and Search received signed-off w/ YELLOWs. Work to address the remaining issues started last week. Most of them are addressed before Aug 2.
  • The new organization with search has been enabled in 56 to ride the trains to release!
• Photon Preferences patches are being worked on right now. Should have everything landed or in review by Aug 7.

Privacy/Security

• Holding off a couple of days to land site permission management in preferences in a new dialog in 57, with a few follow-up bugs already filed.
• Working on a new onboarding experiment around better Tracking Protection UI.
• jkt is working on patches to m-c that enable Containers to run as a WebExtension

Search and Navigation

• Location Bar:
  • The popup doesn’t show a scrollbar anymore, instead it just adapts itself to the browser.urlbar.maxRichResults pref value
  • Pref-based Shield studies will now be able to define a different results mixture based on the search context
  • Fixed a regression in the way we cache one-off buttons in urlbar and search bar
  • Evelyn added speculative connection to the Current Search Engine
  • We have a patch to speed up UnifiedComplete startup time by lazy loading all the urlbar prefs (pending review)
• Jank-free Bookmarking:
  • A QE session has been booked to test Async Places Transactions, currently only enabled in Nightly, planned for 57 \o/ (ง°ل͜°)ง
  • Fixed a regression in the Bookmark All Tabs dialog
  • Currently investigating API optimizations when acting on hundreds of bookmarks at once
• Downloads
  • Downloads history integration code is being refactored to share it more easily with Photon downloads views
• Misc:
  • The Places connection shutdown now uses an Async Shutdown Blocker instead of a custom notification. This allows to simplify the History expiration code, that should soon move to idleDispatch.
  • Fixed some frequent intermittent failures, leaks, tests missing from the manifests and useless tests

Sync / Firefox Accounts

• Autofill address sync is coming in 56. Landed, but pref’d off for now.
• Bidirectional bookmark sync is coming to iOS! Please follow the meta bug if you’re interested.
• The history engine now uses Sqlite.jsm to query Places, and PlacesUtils.history.insertMany, instead of hand-rolled wrappers that spin the event loop. Thanks to contributors Santiago Paez and Luciano Italiani!
• Bookmark validation is now enabled through early betas. Please report any perf regressions you see when syncing bookmarks.
• Edouard made Sync UI startup lazier and snappier.

Test Pilot  (text only, have a meeting conflict)

• Firefox Screenshots continues to improve in Beta.  We will launch in 56 with a small percentage of people and roll out the feature over a few weeks.
• We’ve started blogging at https://medium.com/firefox-test-pilot .  Tune in for experiment updates on the new experiments

Web Payments

• [Bug 1381179 – Resolved] Added “Toolkit :: WebPayments UI” component on Bugzilla
• [Bug 1381186] Handles showPayment & abortPayment from the merchant
• [Bug 1382388] Handles abort event from the user (other way around)
• [Bug 1383300] Started getting the “total” and the “origin” from the API on showPayment and display in the dialog
• Next: integrate autofillStorage to pre-populate “Shipping address” selector

  • 

    We want to make purchasing online safe and easy

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.