These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 24

Highlights

• Firefox Quantum (57) is now on Beta! Developer Edition has also gone to 57! Tell everyone you know, tell people you don’t know, test like crazy, file bugs!

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    How much faster? Twice. Twice more faster.

• Firefox for iOS 9.0 shipped last week! 🎉
  • Crash ratio and stability for 9.0 is good and without surprises. The work we have done in terms of stability appears to have paid off!
  • About 40% of our users have upgraded to Firefox for iOS 9.0
  • About 30% of our users have upgraded to iOS 11
    

    Just in case you need a little extra space!

• Containers officially launched as an add-on on AMO! Related to that, we removed the (old) containers toolbar icon. See jkt’s email to dev-platform for more info.
• Activity Stream has replaced about:home! It’s passing all relevant performance tests and browser startup benchmarks, but we’ve still got a few ideas up our sleeves to improve speed a bit more. We’re targeting on shipping Activity Stream as the default home and newtab page for Firefox 57!
• There’s now an option to toggle extra vertical drag space on browser windows without a titlebar or menubar.
• We added new copy and illustrations to (almost) all the error pages (thank you to Prathiksha & Erica for helping out).

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    You can do it, little buddy!

• Swanky new panel animations landed!

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    Swoosh!

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/2fLz71p
  • More than one bug fixed:
    • :prathiksha
    • Adam Hillier
    • Maya Messinger
    • Tomislav Jovanovic :zombie
    • Tooru Fujisawa [:arai]
  • New contributors (🌟 = First Patch!)
    • 🌟 anting004 updated the icons used in the customize mode theme panel for the default, dark and light themes!
    • 🌟 F Seita [:fseita] made the names for some of the variables and primitives used in the Telemetry back-end much clearer!
    • 🌟 Maya Messinger updated the ordering of items in the Library panel to match the Photon spec!

Project Updates

Add-ons

• Added a prompt for the devtools_page manifest permission
• Switched browserSettings to be an optional permission
• The address bar is now cleared when opening a new tab page that is being overridden by an extension!
• The enter key is now prevented from closing extension panels
• The toolbar text color can now be modified separately from the global text color, via themes
• A new default search engine can be added via the is_default option
• A basic implementation of storage.managed is now available. Here’s the API documentation on MDN – expect this to be fleshed out more soon.
• browsingData is now able to clear IndexedDB data
• about:preferences now shows when an extension is controlling the new tab page.

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    Now if an add-on overrides your new tab or home pages, you know which one did it.

• Added support for the devtools.panels.elements sidebar.setExpression API method.
• Lots of performance fixes, bug fixes and code cleanup!

Activity Stream

• Landed improved Top Sites with full rich icon support!

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

• We will do a gradual rollout of Address Autofill for 56 (en-US in the US) with a Shield Experiment that flips the right preferences.
• Credit card autofill quality is being improved and will ship when it’s ready (sometime after Firefox 57).
• We fixed the following bugs:
  • [Form Autofill] Manage credit cards dialog should have the ability to mask card numbers again after they are shown
  • [Form Autofill] Add “Learn more” links to SUMO pages in preferences
  • [Form Autofill] Fix manage addresses / credit cards line height problem
  • [Form Autofill] -“Form Autofill Preferences” is displayed under the profile suggestions on MacOS
  • [Form Autofill] – “Never Save Credit Cards” text is displayed with small c for credit in the door hanger
  • [Form Autofill] Collect information on how much time users spent on page with credit card forms
  • Always build the form autofill system add-on but disable it by default on release
  • Form Autofill preferences should support search function
  • [Form Autofill] Add a pref to hide credit card autofill feature
  • browser_creditCard_doorhanger.js is going to permafail when Gecko 57 merges to Beta
  • [Form Autofill] FormAutofillHandler.jsm, line 182: TypeError: fieldDetail is undefined
  • [Form Autofill] Disable credit card heuristics when credit card availability is set to false
  • [Form Autofill] Add test cases to check the search result that fallback from credit card fields

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

• mconley is working on getting tab warming working again – just getting through some test failures
• Florian is working on automated frame counting and flickering detection in screen recording videos.

Structure

• Created a “Recent Highlights” list in the library, with data from Activity Stream

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    Saw something interesting? It might be in Recent Highlights!

  • Seems there are some cases where this stops showing up (either in other windows / after “a while”) – if you can help with solid STR, that would be awesome.
• Fixed a bunch of polish bugs.

Visuals

• Volunteer :Towkir replaced the bookmark toolbar icons with new shiny Photon icons.

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    Consistency is good!

• Dale prevented a strange bug where the tab bar would scroll when you leave customize mode.
• Johann finally made the Windows 7 tabs toolbar adhere to the Photon spec, clearing up a couple of bugs that had accumulated there during the last weeks.
• Nihanth switched the titlebar on macOS to always use the native appearance.
• And lots! of small regression fixes and polish work.

Privacy/Security

• Prathiksha finished up a few polish bugs on permission management, we consider it MVP-ready and it’s shipping in Firefox 57!

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    Who’s in control? You are.

Search and Navigation

• Address Bar:
  • The network code fix to prevent speculative connections from showing certificate dialogs landed again in Nightly 58 and got uplifted. Speculative connections from the Address Bar will be enabled in Firefox Quantum
  • The Address bar now can merge results from the previous search into the current one, to reduce flickering of matching results. The patch also removed about 2000 “potential” reflows!
  • Fixed wrong cropping of matching results in the Address Bar, regressed by the recent changes to the merging method
  • Added preferences to more easily show/hide the Search Bar in Photon

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      Unified URL / Search bar, or separated? We’ll leave that up to you.

• Places:
  • The recent Activity Stream work on favicons caused a couple regressions. We fixed favicons using “masked” icons even if we still don’t support them and  tabs favicons using “rich” icons instead of common favicons (Firefox Quantum)
  • The hashes used by Places to match on URIs are now faster to calculate. This change is partially non backwards compatible, so profiles downgraded from Firefox 58 to 57 may hit unexpected bugs when trying to modify/remove bookmarks/history for certain URIs (very long ones or containing high unicode chars)
  • Since Quantum/Photon got priority, Places Async Transactions have been delayed to Firefox 58, to properly solve the remaining performance issues. But the work continues on functional regressions and async APIs conversion.
• Other:
  • We are going to launch a Cliqz funnelcake in Germany in the next days.
  • Sqlite on Linux is now a tiny bit more I/O efficient thanks to a contributed patch by Wei Liang using fdatasync when it’s available.

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 in-tree docs for Web Payments if you’re interested in contributing!
• We landed the following bugs:
  • Bug 1402210 – Add PaymentRequest UI documentation and do minor code cleanup
  • Bug 1382388 – Make the PaymentRequest dialog unprivileged and remote plus add an abort button
    • Dialog contents are now in a remote, unprivileged frame to improve security and responsiveness. See docs for more info.
• Currently working on Bug 1383300 – Show origin and total roughly similar to the UX specs.
• A platform bug hindering manual testing was fixed by another landing.

Here are the raw meeting notes that were used to derive this list.

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