Categories: News

These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 24

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

  • Formed a team to do a design review on XBL removal plans
  • Sent out a front-end developer survey
  • See our most recent newsletter!

Electrolysis (e10s)

  • Improvements to memory usage means we might consider increasing the content process limit at some point in the future. Check out erahm’s blog post!

Firefox Core Engineering

  • Update agent work has begun, starting with the downloader, which plans to spin off the update download as a background process (so the update continues even if the user’s session ends). This is aiming for Firefox 58.
  • Optimized data in crash reports and crash ping processing have landed in Firefox 57 (even though they were targeted for 58).
  • JAWS client version has been added to the updater URL, just in time for Firefox 56.

Form Autofill

Mobile

  • First Firefox iOS 9.1 Beta is in QA and will ship soon with a modest list of small fixes
  • First Firefox iOS 10.0 Beta is currently being prepared. This is our Photon UI release. We expect to have it on TestFlight for our Beta testers very soon.
  • The Firefox iOS team’s focus for the upcoming release is on Photon, Telemetry and Stability

Photon

Performance
Structure
Visuals

Privacy/Security

  • Prathiksha finished up a few polish bugs on permission management, we consider it MVP-ready and it’s shipping in Firefox 57!
    • Showing the DOM permissions UI under about:preferences.

      Who’s in control? You are.

Search and Navigation

Sync / Firefox Accounts

  • Edouard is implementing native “toast” desktop notifications for Windows 8 and 10!
  • Kit is porting structured bookmark application to Desktop from iOS. Instead of applying downloaded bookmarks directly to Places, we’ll stage them in a separate buffer, run a tree merge, resolve conflicts, and then update Places in a single transaction.
    • This will fix a class of persistent bugs around random dupes, moves, reordering, incorrectly merged folders, interrupted syncs, and devices falling out of sync with the server.
  • Thom is removing more event loop spinning from Sync.
    • This should prevent Sync from spuriously appearing in performance profiles, unless it’s actually janking the browser.
  • Edouard landed a more responsive Sync animation if you click “Sync Now” at startup before Sync has loaded.

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.

4 comments on “These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 24”

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  1. Glitch Walker wrote on

    I have already made a much more detailed review on my blog.

    In a nutshell, Quantum is certainly very zippy (especially having temporarily come off Pale Moon to give it a try). However, now more than ever is the time to bring WebExtensions up to _genuine_ feature parity with the cocktail of “legacy” add-ons, to yet possibly salvage badwill earned with Firefox Add-On developers. Otherwise, Mozilla and Firefox are going to fall into obsolescence… At a time we need a non-profit heavyweight in the browserspace more than ever.

    Reply

  2. happysurf wrote on

    What’s happen with the new bookmarks toolbar icons in dark Personas skins?
    The gray folder is dark, maybe is not good recognized on dark background or is inverted like the navigation toolbar icons?
    Thanks.

    Reply

  3. qwertyuiopyozo wrote on

    It would be nice to see the launcher toolbar brought back into the Activity Stream new tab page, especially restore previous session feature.

    Reply

  4. Jackson wrote on

    The bookmarks and history menus, most of the menus actually, do not adhere to the dark theme. I’d prefer it if the New Tab screen with all it’s features and highlights adhered to the theme, too. Seems inconsistent and surface level. I believe people genuinely want a full coverage dark theme.

    Reply

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