These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 27

Highlights

• Data preference changes have been streamlined in 58, and segmented into release and prerelease data.

• Nihanth enabled the vibrancy effect from the default theme in the light theme on OSX.

Vibrant!

• Extensions can now request to disable desktop notifications, and the theme API supports styling more color properties.

• We updated the installer icon for Firefox 57

  • Thanks to /u/jasonrmns on Reddit’s /r/firefox for bringing this to our attention!

• The JavaScript start-up bytecode cache has been enabled on Nightly!

  • nbp describes impact here

    • “1. This removes on average 43 ms of every page load. (while being effective on ~50% of the page loads)
      2. Talos benchmarks reports a 15% improvement on google.com.
      3. On a personal Window computer with PGO, my personal Facebook page load improved from 641ms to 522ms.”

• 14 million Firefox Screenshots created in the last 30 days!

  

• Firefox for iOS v10.0 is rolling out at max-spiffy with Photon style on November 14th

  

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/2iC1Iqy
    • More than one bug fixed:
      • :prathiksha
      • Tim Nguyen :ntim
    • New contributors (🌟 = First Patch!)
      • 🌟 Manish Kumar updated some variable names used by Sync to make them more consistent
      • 🌟 Andrea Casaccia fixed a Library panel glitch when middle-clicking on items in “Recent Highlights”
      • 🌟 Mithilan Sivanesan enabled ESLint for the /chrome folder
      • 🌟 Nicole Byer fixed expiry dates of session cookies in session restore

Project Updates

Add-ons

• The tabs API now supports a discard method.

• The theme API can also return information about the current theme.

Activity Stream

• Final sign-off has been made to ship AS on about:home and about:newtab in Firefox 57

  • We are launching studies in 57 to study how Activity Stream affects long-term Firefox retention for both new and existing users

• The focus for Firefox 58 has been performance:

  • Landed improved image caching for better about:home perf

  • Landed streamlined localized string processing for faster startup

  • Working on a number of improvements to reduce dependency on Thumbnail service by using canned or harvested High Res icons more frequently

Browser Architecture

• De-XBL is moving forwards – follow along at our tracking website

• Support for custom elements in XUL is in review

Firefox Core Engineering

• Mhowell heroics via a last-minute rename of the Windows shortcut from “Mozilla Firefox” to “Firefox” in 57, but it was backed out. Now targeting 58.

• Still aiming to land CFI support for client-side stackwalking in 58.

Form Autofill

• Fixed a few compatibility issues with top sites for the MVP.

• Fixed a footer issue that affects form history.

• Fixed a preview issue when autofilling <select> elements.

• Credit card syncing is green for rollout in 58.

Mobile

• Firefox iOS

  • We are putting Firefox iOS v10.0 up for app review today
  • We brought back 1Password support
  • More iPhone X compatibility improvements
  • We will be shipping with 73 locales included
  • We have an improved Night Mode
  • New ‘Hide Images’ mode that blocks image loading at the network level to reduce data usage
  • Start using Mozilla’s Unified Telemetry for tracking user counts (DAU/WAU/MAU); this component is available as a stand-alone iOS library for other projects to use
  • We’ve started looking for rel=”canonical” links when the user copies or shares a URL, to stop AMP links from spreading.
  • Revamped our L10n screenshots using a newly updated ScreenGraph, which we were already using for UI testing. This is a tool that helps you describe your app as a graph of screens and states, and then uses GameplayKit to navigate around the app.
  • We are planning our 10.1 release already

Photon

Performance

• Tab warming got another round of review, and now investigating test failures after applying the feedback.

• Working on the tab strip scrolling speed regression when not working on tab warming

Structure

• Mike, together with Drew fixed up the panels in cases where scrollbars would overlap the content, instead of properly show it.

• Mike made it so that adding a bookmark now defaults to ‘Other Bookmarks’ from everywhere.

• Sam fixed and is still working on polish issues with the new panel transition.

• Jared removed unused PanelUI-popup code.

• Mike updated the Send to Device icon in the Page Actions menu.

• Drew spent quite a bit effort on reconciling WebExtension page actions and Photon page actions.

• Gijs made it so that private browsing and other titlebar placeholder icons, like minimize/maximize buttons, can not be opted to be pinned to the overflow menu.

Visuals

• Johann made the overflow menu get larger when opened through touch, like the other Photon menus.

• Bug 1299286 just landed and enables users to touch-drag customize mode items on Windows touch devices. If it sticks, this makes it easy to add touch support to other drag interfaces by adding a DOM attribute (next up is dragging tabs in the tabstrip).

• Some more bug fixes.

Privacy/Security

• Since IndexedDB access has been managed via the cookie permission for some time now, Prathiksha removed the IndexedDB row in the “Permissions” section of page info. Next up is getting rid of the dead permission prompts and other remnants of this permission.

• You no longer need to restart your browser to change the Tracking Protection blocklist.

Search and Navigation

Address Bar & Search

• Remote search engines now can use icons larger than 10KB (up to 20KB, then they will be rescaled if possible). Fixes a recent regression with the Baidu engine icon.

• Fixed the Address Bar results right alignment, lost when maximizing the window.

Places

• We now make better choices when picking favicons from pages. Fixes some blurry icons (including Youtube).

• The Places Async Transactions prefs have been set to ride the train to release 58:

  • deleting lots of bookmarks at once is now faster

  • More fixes are planned for moving lots of bookmarks at once

• Improved performance when removing history , due to orphan icons removals

• Reliability project

  • Validation of bookmark backups is more lenient. It will try to restore as many bookmarks as possible from the backup, fixing up invalid data when possible

More

• Fixed filename sanitization for downloads with Content-Disposition: inline

• Removed the image XBL binding

Sync / Firefox Accounts

• `chrome.storage.sync` works again: the server is now handling about 50k requests per minute.

• Thom fixed a bug where we’d schedule five unnecessary follow-up syncs in a row if the current sync failed.

• Lots of code cleanup: unifying our HTTP request wrappers, removing dead code, refactoring how we download records.

Test Pilot

• Currently photonizing the Test Pilot website

• Minvid experiment preparing for Shield study

• Screenshots update:

  • Engagement research: Jared added uploads/downloads to main Telemetry ping

  • Site-specific engagement experiments: Ian landed a patch to enable running multiple A/B tests on the site at the same time. We’re hoping to run 3 this quarter.

  • Usage is remarkably steady over last 30 days, with downloads slightly stronger than uploads.

Web Payments

• Showing the total and origin in the payment dialog

• Prototyped a large portion of the dialog using Custom Elements with a Redux-like data subscription to evaluate the approach.

  • Next step is to get feedback on this approach and then start implementing the UX spec