Categories: News

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)
    • A screenshot of Firefox running on macOS. The titlebar is translucent.

      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.
    • A screenshot of Firefox running on macOS with the dark theme enabled.

      Looking slick!

  • New animations for bookmarking and Pocket’ing!
    • Firefox on a Windows desktop showing off the latest icon animations.

      Tremendous!

 

 

 

Friends of the Firefox team

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

Project Updates

Add-ons

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
  • Crashes/Stability
  • 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

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.

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

Structure

Animation

Visuals

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.
  • Photon Preferences patches are being worked on right now. Should have everything landed or in review by Aug 7.

Privacy/Security

Search and Navigation

Sync / Firefox Accounts

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
    • A user making a purchase on a website using the Web Payments API

      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.

9 comments on “These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 21”

Post a comment

  1. KarinaJohnson wrote on

    Please don’t remove support for Android 4.0.4 .

    Reply

  2. Corey wrote on

    Don’t remove support for Android 4.0.4, please.

    Reply

  3. 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

  4. Leo_sk wrote on

    is there any way to restore those curved tabs? The rectangular ones are too pointy for my taste. thanks in advance

    Reply

  5. Christina wrote on

    Please see the first Christina post for info… on why I can’t use the Firefox Nightly update channle Nightly.
    What is Firefox Nightly update channle nightly-date? Becuase it is the only Firefox for
    windows 10 creators update I use. Because I can’t get Firefox Nightly update channle Nightly to work on my windows 10 creators update. And I wanted the leastest verson of Firefox which is 57. And I wanted to send in crashes to if I find any.

    Reply

  6. Christina wrote on

    Please if there is away to have a choice… if you want rectangular or curved tabs please make that a choice. Or at least away to get back the… curved tabs because me too… the rectangular tabs are too pointy for my tastes.

    Reply

  7. John M. wrote on

    the new icon in nightly 57.0a1 (2017-08-12) is really ugly (on the desktop).
    What happened to the animation on the Reload button? Please bring it back.
    Thank you.

    Reply

  8. Joey wrote on

    What’s up with the new Icon? I really liked the most recent one before this (the nice blue/lavender fox) and now it appears to be some sort of flame bird? (http://i.imgur.com/4gd4Ryy.png)

    Reply

    1. John M. wrote on

      the blue icon was the best for nightly, it was beautiful, modern and user friendly, but unfortunately they replaced it with childish and ugly icon(s).
      as you know the Windows 10’s taskbar is black and the flame bird icon is almost invisible on it. So it’s hard to see that.

      Reply

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