Categories: News

These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 27

Highlights

Firefox for MacOS with light theme vibrancy

Vibrant!

Friends of the Firefox team

(Give a shoutout/thanks to people for helping fix and test bugs. Introductions)

Project Updates

Add-ons

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

Firefox Core Engineering

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

Structure

Visuals

Resized overflow menu

  • 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

Search and Navigation

Address Bar & Search

Places

More

Sync / Firefox Accounts

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

One comment on “These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 27”

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  1. dbcooper wrote on

    Does Firefox for iOS work with iOS content blockers?

    Reply

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