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

• The Search Bar has been moved to the Customization Palette for new profiles! This exciting change also caused interesting Talos improvements to tart, sessionrestore and paint times.
• Activity Stream has landed Highlights Section with more diverse results
• After much experimenting, testing and validation, e10s-multi (4 processes) is being rolled out to 100% of our release population for 55!
• Photon Performance reports that our dashboards show very good wins on things we measure when comparing Firefox 55 to 57!
  • Eg. startup is about 50% faster in 57 than it was in 55!
• Screenshots integration is now on Nightly! It’s in the Page Action menu.
• Mike (de Boer) added a Downloads subview to the library panel
• We’ll be relanding the autohiding download button behaviour today, but after much debate, this time with a switch to turn it off.
• Firefox 57 code is in soft-freeze starting this Friday (Sept 15), in preparation for the merge to beta on Sept 20

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/2gYQnDR
  • More than one bug fixed:
    • :Perry Jiang
    • Cosm
    • Kevin Jones
    • Rob Wu [:robwu]
    • Simon Lindholm
    • Steve Armand
    • Tomislav Jovanovic :zombie
    • Tushar Saini (:shatur)
    • akriti verma
    • flyingrub
  • New contributors (🌟 = First Patch!)
    • 🌟 kiril made it so that we don’t attempt to load URLs stored in the clipboard when middle-clicking on the content area on Linux. This is an 11 year old bug!
    • Steve Armand got rid of a file we were accidentally packaging for ~10 years, updated a label in the “Show tabs from other devices” menu, and removed some pages from about:about
    • 🌟 Adrian Wielgosik cleaned up our code by getting rid of a bunch of deprecated sidebar functions
    • akriti verma got rid of some old unnecessary tab image override code and also made it so that we don’t change the “Go” button colour when hovering, as per the Photon spec!
    • 🌟 Cosm updated a bunch of in-tree links to the new home for our source documentation, and then got rid of an unnecessary variable in our MAR library
    • 🌟 ljbousfield fixed how extension IDs are stored in the tab.mutedInfo WebExtension API (they were the internal UUIDs instead of the actual WebExtension IDs)
    • 🌟 Rei Colina updated some strings to match the Photon spec in our new Page Action menu
    • 🌟 Vedant Chakravadhanula updated some label styling in Customize Mode to be more consistent with its surroundings

Project Updates

Add-ons

• Added a discarded property to the Tab object in the tabs API.
• Added support for separators to the bookmarks API.
• Added support for setWindowValue and setTabValue to the sessions API.
• Introduced a clipboard API with a setImageData function which allows for images to be copied to the clipboard.
• Added a browserSettings function to control image animation behaviour.
• Added a devtools API to register an extension sidebar for the inspector panel.
• Added a loadReplace option to tabs.update which replaces the current page in the tab’s history with the newly loaded page.
• Added browserSettings functions to read the current values of the home page and new tab page, and know whether they are being controlled by an extension.
• Added support for filtering streaming response data via webRequest API.
• Lots of performance fixes, bug fixes and code cleanup!

Activity Stream

• Landed Top Sites improvements (soon with more rich icons, thanks mak!)
• Added Prerendering support for faster about:home hero element timing
• Started third Shield study, preffing on Activity Stream for Tier1+2 countries in 56 Beta
• Working with PI to ensure about:home + Activity Stream doesn’t regress startup
  • Also discussing with Product on desired focus when starting Firefox
• Working through remaining 17 fx57 P1 issues
  • Additional perf telemetry
  • Turning on about:home and prerendering
  • NSFW filtering

Browser Architecture

• Problems with XBL have been documented
• A de-XBL meta bug exists
• An architecture review process is being developed
• Check out our last newsletter!

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

• QE Signoff on Address Autofill given for 56 (en-US in the US)
• Verifying telemetry data
• Fixed
  • [Form Autofill] Support filling in “cc-given-name”, “cc-additional-name” and “cc-family-name”
  • [Creditcard Autofill] Collect information on how many times did users apply credit card autofill
  • [Form Autofill] Collect information on how much time users spent on page with forms (w/wo form autofill)
  • [Form Autofill] Manage credit cards dialog should have the ability to mask card numbers again after they are shown
  • Sending message that cannot be cloned at FormAutofillContent.jsm:161:6
  • [Form Autofill] Autofill stops working after switching between two forms
  • [Form Autofill] Preferences shows the duplicated records after records changed while the address dialog is opening
  • [Form Autofill] Data Loss in Saved Addresses when submitting to update from a form
  • [Form Autofill] Data Loss in Saved Addresses when submitting to update from a form
  • [Form Autofill] Tune the height of form autofill dropdown item from 29px to 30px
  • [Form Autofill] Recognize “United States” as “United States”
  • [Doorhanger] Alternative main action button styling for form autofill
  • [Form Autofill] Ignore autocomplete=off attr for the credit card fields

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

• Drew fixed a bunch of issues relating to the ordering, appearance and behaviour of the page action button and its items
• Rei Colina helped us out by updating some of the page action panel labels
• Various aspects of panels now look better.
• Only 1 other MVP bug left – updated panel subview animations – which has r+ and is close to landing on central.
• Various other polish bugs got fixed!

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

• Address Bar:
  • The Firefox / Location Bar component in Bugzilla has been renamed to Address Bar to be consistent with Preferences
  • The latest Unified Search Study testing different Address Bar results mixtures is live in Beta, will end on 26th of September
  • Thanks to the Network team, Speculative Connections don’t risk anymore to open a Client Certificate Selection dialog. The patch will be uplifted to 56.
  • To avoid overlapping with the onboarding experience on about pages, the Search Suggestions notification won’t be shown anymore when opening home/newtab page, but only when the user explicitly focuses or clicks the location bar (or types into it).
  • Fixed an apparent keyboard trap when the Search Suggestions hint was shown
  • The Address Bar dropdown icon is not shown anymore while the user is typing
  • Dão made the Address Bar show a search icon on about:newtab, about:home, about:blank
  • Simon Lindholm contributed another patch to improve the Address Bar querying time
• Places:
  • The bookmarks toolbar, when visible, now consumes less memory and starts up faster, especially for users with a lot of bookmarks on it
  • Hector Zhao added a pref to always open bookmarks in a new tab
  • Fixed various regressions with Places Async Transactions
• Misc:
  • Some intermittent tests were fixed

Test Pilot

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