These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 26

Highlights

• Prathiksha moved the pop-up blocked icon/menu from the urlbar to the identity block/identity pop-up (the notification bar for blocked popups is still there).

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    Blocking pop-ups since before it was cool.

• Please read our plans for removing XBL.
• Nihanth optimized bookmark and history sidebar spacing for touch mode.

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    Because chances are, your fingers are larger than your mouse cursor.

• We now store high-res favicons in Places. Favicons in the bookmarks and history views will use the best icon size available.
• Address Bar results are now constrained to the input field width to look more balanced

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    Bringing balance to the AwesomeBar!

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/2yIrr8z
  • More than one bug fixed:
    • :prathiksha
    • Ian Moody [:Kwan]
    • Masatoshi Kimura [:emk]
    • Sebastian Hengst [:aryx][:archaeopteryx]
  • New contributors (🌟 = First Patch!)
    • 🌟Adam Morris cleaned up an unused probe for about:newtab
    • 🌟anting004 added a tooltip to devices listed in Send Tab to Device to show the last sync time
    • hardik tyagi [:hrdktg] fixed how we display download dates for certain locales
    • 🌟Kevin Pellet (Ilphrin) made some Sync code more efficient by avoiding a linear look-up in an Array, and using a Set instead.
    • Joshua Longhi got rid of the toolkit.telemetry.enabled preference checkbox in about:preferences
    • 🌟 Leonel Jara reorganized some Places tests
    • 🌟 Fernando refactored a chunk of our Telemetry code to do locking differently
    • 🌟 nikshepsvn got rid of some obsolete functions that were only sticking around for legacy add-on compat
    • Philippe Normand [:philn] fixed a non-Unified build problem
    • 🌟 Simon Van Accoleyen removed the last vestiges of the SocialAPI

Project Updates

Add-ons

• webRequest.onBeforeRequest listeners can now receive ancestors URLs information.
• Tests will now fail if a browser.test.onMessage handler throws an error in tests.
• The downloads API now uses Firefox’s Save As preference as a default.
• Confirm/alert/prompt dialogs now work from options_ui with OOP enabled.
• history.search and history.getVisits now return hidden entries, such as redirects.
• tabs.create can now create tabs which open URLS in reader mode.
• It is now possible to create locked-down APIs that are only available to Mozilla-signed extensions.
• Extensions can now control the privacy.firstparty.isolate pref.
• Content Script sandboxes now have a sandboxName set on them.

Activity Stream

• Shifted focus for Firefox 58 to measuring and improving perceived performance on startup.
  • Cache of stories and topics on disk
  • Reduce duplicate places queries on startup
  • Prerender strings for each locale

Browser Architecture

• Richard has been thinking about syncing. ☜(ﾟヮﾟ☜)

Electrolysis (e10s)

• The e10s rollout system add-on has been removed as of Firefox 58, and the way we control how e10s is enabled or disabled in prefs will be (from 58 forward) the same across Nightly all the way to Release. You can read more about this on the relevant mailing list post.
• OS PIDs were missing from tab tooltips, but this has recently been fixed.
• The menu items for opening e10s and non-e10s windows have been removed. If you desperately need to open a non-e10s window, pop open the Browser Console, and use: OpenBrowserWindow({remote: false})

Firefox Core Engineering

• The 58 stub installer supports resuming interrupted downloads.
• High-DPI installer assets added in 57.

Form Autofill

• MVP
  • The gradual rollout of address autofill has started on Fx56 (1%)
  • Tuning site compatibility issues.
  • Improved heuristics algorithm about “cc-exp*” and “tel-national”
  • Polished UI
  • Credit card number deduplication in progress
• V2
  • Enable localization on mozilla-central – Almost done (one bug left)
  • Clear button in the autocomplete dropdown – Patch ready
  • Section (multiple forms in one page)  support – Discussed architecture
  • Additional country support – Discussed architecture

Mobile

• On Android
  • We now show favicons in the tabs tray
  • Custom Tabs support has been enabled by default on Nightly and now Beta as well
  • “Sync by Wi-Fi only” preference now available on Nightly, pushed through by a contributor
  • We got a nice shout-out for supporting wide gamut colors (DCI-P3) in Marques Brownlee’s (MKBHD) Pixel 2 review video!

Photon

Performance

• Tab warming patches are up for review. This will land disabled to stabilize, and a follow-up bug will be filed to enable warming.
  • Once this is enabled, mconley will start filing bugs for more places where it makes sense to warm tabs (eg. selecting Switch To Tab from the AwesomeBar)
• Weighing / reviewing a patch from jaws that will switch to APNG tab throbbers in the event that the system is under very heavy load.
• Working on a patch to fix a tab scrolling velocity regression
  • This will likely introduce a new “scrollend” chrome-only event, which we might find handy in other places as well. Follow the bug for details.
• Please read Naveed’s e-mail about performance bugs! We’re really just getting started with performance work, so strap in.

Structure

• Overflow panel layout fixes in Customize Mode and when dealing with flexible spaces.
• The Panels have received love, notably WebExtension panels and the Forget button panel look better. Also scroll state fixes happened.
• The sidebar button state is now persisted between different windows properly.
• ‘Send to Device’ page action has an updated icon.

Animation

• Got a spec from UX for adding an animation to our panel-multi-views to hopefully make it more obvious that users need to click on an item to see a subview (not hover)
• Working with UX to come up with a workable design for animating the sidebar opening/closing

Visuals

• Stephen Pohl fixed the tab strip choppiness when going into fullscreen mode on OSX.
• Johann updated the accent color of the Web Browser Renaissance theme.

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    We like to think that da Vinci would approve!

• Mostly fixing a lot of polish bugs.

Platform Audibles

• Retained display lists landed very recently, preffed off behind layout.display-list.retain. Here’s that mailing list post about it again, just in case you forgot.

Privacy/Security

• We fixed a nasty bug that caused all containers to be removed when upgrading a container extension in Beta.

Search and Navigation

• Address Bar & Search
  • The results mixture (showing Search Suggestions first) has been reverted for now. We’ll proceed differently, experimenting at first with new profiles who get a unified Address Bar experience by default
  • The follow-on search add-on was updated to 0.9.6 for FF 56 users

• Places
  • Hi-res favicons project is considered complete, from now on bugs will be tracked as single issues
    • Old favicon tables and indices have been removed
    • The mysterious case of favicons intermittently not being shown on tabs was due to a bug in Network Tailing
  • Bookmarks HTML import/export code has been converted to the Async Bookmarks API
  • Async Places Transactions got a green light from QE to be released in Firefox 58
    • Some minor regressions have been fixed
    • Some perf improvement (still working on perf)
  • Fixed a case where on schema migration places.sqlite could be marked as corrupt when it’s not
• More
  • Properly fixed idle-daily so that it doesn’t run during mochitests.
  • Fixed a Mac specific bug with “View Full Screen” being shown twice in the view menu for the Library window (and other windows).

Sync / Firefox Accounts

• Bookmark validation and repair are moving to a system add-on.
• The device list in Synced Tabs and Send Tab now match the FxA devices view.
• The buttons in the Synced Tabs view now match the Photon style guide, and we no longer show duplicate separators in the context menu for image links.
• Saved passwords with dubious timestamps no longer cause syncs to fail on Android.
• Landed Places maintenance tasks to fix up bookmarks with missing and invalid GUIDs, missing dates, invalid Place GUIDs, and clean up tombstones for undeleted bookmarks.

Test Pilot

• More experiments coming in Q1: tab split, voice assistant, theming
  • Here’s the experiment pipeline in Trello
• Firefox Screenshots
  • The story so far:
    • Page Shot got lots of usage + interest in Test Pilot
    • Work to graduate into Firefox started in 54 timeframe
    • Screenshots was the first WebExtension system addon
    • Shipped to release in 56 (rolled out Sept 28)
  • Since release:
    • 11 million shots, 5 million unique users
    • Downloads slightly outpacing uploads:
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    • SHIELD worked well for rollout:
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• What’s next?
  • Q4: Build more features to ship in 58; run A/B tests on the site; perf optimization; user surveys; figure out how best to interact with the rest of Firefox
• Open questions:
  • What’s a good user retention percentage?
  • Do Screenshots users have higher MAU/DAU?
  • How best to manage Github vs Bugzilla for bugs, reviews, code?
    • Every system addon does this differently right now
    • Interested in this? Let us know on #screenshots