These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 28

Highlights

Too many New Tabs to contain!

• We turned on Pocket local personalization by default which takes the generic story feed and adjusts the ordering based on client-side computation of history / impressions.
• The Flash Click-to-Play UI has been restyled to match Photon styling! Landed for Firefox 58
  • Live demo, specs demo, before and after

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.

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

• High-speed scrolling in the tab strip is buttery smooth again!
• Doug Thayer, while investigating reasons for slow migrations, largely improved the time needed to insert lots of visits at once. More fixes for migration performance incoming in the next weeks!

Friends of the Firefox team

• Resolved bugs (excluding employees): https://mzl.la/2A1Fmaz
  • More than one bug fixed:
    • Aditya Bharti
    • Tim Nguyen :ntim
    • Tooru Fujisawa [:arai]
  • New contributors (🌟 = First Patch!)
    • 🌟 86ecce74 helped us get rid of an unneeded XBL binding! Great to see another binding bite the dust.
    • 🌟 QuanTakeuchi removed the unused mIconLoadingPricipal field!

Project Updates

Add-ons

• Fixed some bugs with the browser.identity.launchWebAuthFlow API.
• Fixed a crash with webRequest.filterResponseData.
• The theme API now has support for colors.tab_text and colors.background_tab_text and can accept both Chrome arrays and CSS colors for all properties.
• Custom context menus can now be added to bookmarks.
• Extensions can now programmatically register content scripts from a background page.

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…)

• Investigating background thumbnailing issues leading to twitch high CPU / MEDIA_ERR_SRC_NOT_SUPPORTED for youtube/twitch(/netflix?) for 57 users
• Preparing for 59 MIT-licensed React 16 update and other dependency greening

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!
  • Are we XBL still!

Firefox Core Engineering

• Support for CFI-based stackwalking has finally landed and stuck in 59. This affects only the minidump analyzer (and related tests) but will improve the quality of stacks especially for 64bit, and so we’re requesting uplift to 58 beta.
• “Mozilla Firefox” -> “Firefox” rename riding on 58, assuming QA gives it a green.

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.

• Markus Stange worked around a layers/gfx issue the panel animations were running into just before the 57 release (woop!).
• Jared & Gijs removed a bunch of dead code.
• Drew fixed an issue with disabling of page actions.

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

• You can now drag (selected) tabs and items in customize mode using touch.
• Small finishing touches.

Privacy/Security

• The confirm repost prompt is no longer window modal as we start cracking down on window modal prompts to prevent DOS attacks.
• Gijs fixed up clock skew warnings on the cert error pages so that they are only shown when we’re sure they’re correct.
• We’ve started working on integrating haveibeenpwned.com warnings into Firefox, you can follow development here.

Search and Navigation

Address Bar & Search

• Investigating frequent intermittent failures in the omnibox WebExtension test (there are more)
• Removed the code to import old search engine settings from Firefox 44 and before.

Places

• Work continued on improving Places Async Transactions reliability and performance
• Work continued on converting tests to the async Bookmarking APIs
• Examined recent SUMO reports about bookmarks loss, identified various possible reasons to evaluate for our reliability project
• Kit Cambridge is improving annotations and bookmarks performance by removing an annotations observer from the bookmarks service. (blocked on a static analysis problem)

Sync / Firefox Accounts

• Edouard improved sync scheduling when we wake from sleep, reconnect to a flaky network or a network behind a captive portal, and before sleep.
• Edouard is also replacing Sync’s artisanal HTTP client with `fetch`.
  • You can now pass a `{ mozErrors: true }` option to `fetch` and `Request` in chrome code to access the underlying `nsresult` code if the request fails.
• Thom fixed an issue where many sent tabs or bookmark repair responses would overflow the Sync client record size, causing all syncs for that client to permanently fail.
• We’re working with Emily Toop from the Browser Architecture team on a prototype for new storage and sync.

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