Categories: News

These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 23

The team is busy sanding down the last few rough edges, and getting Firefox 57 ready to merge to beta! So busy in fact, that there are no screenshots or GIFs for this blog post. Sorry!

If you’re hankering for a more visual update, check out dolske’s Photon Engineering Newsletter #15!

Highlights

Friends of the Firefox team

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

Project Updates

Add-ons

Activity Stream

Browser Architecture

Firefox Core Engineering

  • Bug 1390703 – Flash Click-to-Play being increased to 25% on Release 55, (hopefully) shortly followed to 100%
  • Bug 1397562 – Update staging is now disabled on OSX and Linux (update staging was disabled on Windows in bug 1397562).
    • This is in response to what we think may be an issue with e10s sandboxing.
    • This is why you may suddenly be seeing a flash of the “Nightly is applying updates” (like in bug 1398641).
  • Bug 1380252, bug 1380254 – Optimized data in crash reports and crash ping processing.
  • Open call for ideas/investigation on bug 1276488 — suspected omnijar corruption, but not much to go on.

Form Autofill

Mobile

  • Firefox iOS 8.3 Shipped last week and contains primarily bug fixes
  • Firefox iOS 9.0 has been sent to QA for final verification and is expected to ship next week. It is a fantastic release with the following highlights:
    • Support for syncing your mobile bookmarks between all your devices
    • Tracking Protection will be enabled by default for Private mode and can be enabled for Regular Mode
    • Large improvements in our data storage layer that should improve performance and stability
    • Many small bug fixes
    • Compatibility with iOS 11 (which likely ships next week)

Photon

Performance
  • For 57 we had to disable tab warming when hovering tabs because it caused more  regressions than we are comfortable fixing for 57. We are now planning to ship this significant perf improvement in 58.
  • All the significant performance improvements we are still working on at this point are at risk for 57 because we are trying to avoid risk.
Structure
Animation
  • Investigation ongoing for bug 1397092 – high cpu usage possibly caused by new 60fps tab loading indicator
  • Fatter download progressbar bug 1387557 in for review, is last animation feature planned for 57
  • Polishing, please report any glitches you see

Search and Navigation

Test Pilot

  • We reduced our JS bundle size from 2.6MB to 736k
  • Send is working on A/B tests and adding password protection

2 comments on “These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 23”

Post a comment

  1. John M. wrote on

    Thank you guys.
    The “Title Bar” option in the “Customize…” section is not visible in the dark theme.

    Reply

  2. happysurf wrote on

    Great work in my opinion.
    I have two suggestions:
    – The Library must open in a tab, not in a separate windows;
    – Add the RSS icon in address bar.
    Thanks.

    Reply

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