Categories: News

These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 28

Highlights

So many new tabs opened.

Too many New Tabs to contain!

Flash Click-to-Play UI

Don’t

  • The Test Pilot website is now Photonized! This was an intense sprint where we touched a huge percentage of the code, changing the styles and rearranging the directory structure of our React components so things are better componentized.
New Test Pilot Design

The site was ready the day before the 57 launch, and it took a ton of effort from everybody.

Friends of the Firefox team

Project Updates

Add-ons

Activity Stream

  • Running 2 experiments on release channel with 1% of new users and 2% of existing users getting old Tiles about:newtab.
  • Added tippy top rich icon service to show icons that are better quality but only advertised by the site to iOS devices (including twitch to avoid thumbnailing…)

Improved tile icons

Browser Architecture

  • Sync and storage team have completed a roadmap review, look for more details in our next newsletter.
  • XBL removal is proceeding. No more XBL bindings in mobile!

Firefox Core Engineering

Form Autofill

  • Credit card autofill is enabled by default on Fx58 beta 5, for users using en-US build and located in the US.
  • We’re ready to increase the availability of Address Autofill on Fx57 from 1% to 20% (Quantum release continues to get better! \o/)
  • Implemented the credit card updating mechanism, including the door hanger and deduplication rules.
  • Fixed some site compatibility issues for credit card expiration dates.
  • Fixed bugs in the suggestion dropdown footer and preferences UIs.
  • Localization push: access keys in autofill doorhangers are now localized, implemented a parser of libaddressinput for knowing which address fields in preferences should be visible in different countries.
  • Refactored FormAutofillHandler to support multiple section mechanism.

Photon

Structure

  • Paolo updated the identity popup cert/security subview to the new photon styling.

New Photon-Style Identity Popup

Animation

  • Sam is working on extracting/polishing some of the SVG utilities we bodged together for the SVG animation work. Includes some SVGO plugins.

Visuals

Privacy/Security

Search and Navigation

Address Bar & Search

Places

Sync / Firefox Accounts

Test Pilot

  • This sprint is focused on updating our dependencies which are very out of date, and cleaning up some old cruft.

Web Payments

  • Made the dialog contents hackable from file: URIs for quick iteration
  • Implemented the first Custom Element (currency-amount)
  • Finishing up the store for dialog state that Custom Elements will listen to
  • Starting to implement the UX spec

2 comments on “These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 28”

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  1. Kay wrote on

    The nightly Android dev build is a great idea but, from the perspective of a non-involved developer, it’d be nice if there was a way to share settings between the android nightly and beta releases so I could quickly drop back to the more stable beta version if there were any problems in the nightly that prohibited its casual use.

    In my case, being able to fire up either version against a common user ‘context’ (history, preferences, favourites etc) would cause me to use (and thus test) the nightly on a pretty much continual basis, safe in the knowledge that I could smoothly drop back to the beta if there were any show stoppers. As things stand, I’ve got two completely different browser contexts.

    Just an idea!

    Reply

  2. Megaman wrote on

    Since I am too lazy to report my high RAM accumulation over time, due to my heavy multi-tasking with tabs and whatnot, I would like to ask “What is the new keyboard shortcut for Restarting the browser?”
    Since no WebEx add-ons currently are available, I have to use the Shift+F12 and leave it open due to my many restarts, but the bar is white(I mostly use my laptop and it uses Firefox Beta) and most of my websites are black along with the Default Dark Theme), thank you for the black bar in Firefox 57, by the way.
    Please implement a restart option in the menu or something, and a method to unload tabs that are opened in the background, our RAM sticks will thank you for it.
    And why isn’t the Add-ons and the hamburger menu options not dark like the theme.
    Also, how can I make the white page into black when loading tabs/opening pages, its blinding white while I have to wait for a page to load and before the Dim add-on would kick in. Also, why not add a permanent dimmer that can be activated at a time of day, by our choosing, so that it doesn’t hurt the eyes at night staring at the screen, with a whitelist for dark website of course?
    I rambled too much, keep up the good work I love this browser.

    Reply

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