These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 31

Highlights

• A lot of fixes for Activity Stream drag and drop landed, improving the overall experience!

  • 

    Order your Top Sites around!

• The WebExtension tabs API now supports a hide and a show method, to hide and show individual tabs. This is currently preffed off, awaiting UX changes. See this blog post for more details.
  • This has been frequently requested from developers hoping to re-implement Tab Groups as a WebExtension
• We ran a user study on how different privacy protections break (or fix) the web. Here’s the blog post.
• The crypto team wrote a blog post about the new WebAuthn API.
• 50 million images have been submitted by Firefox Screenshots users since late 56 cycle!

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/2DHraEr
  • More than one bug fixed:
    • :prathiksha
    • Alejandro Rodriguez Salamanca [:alejandro]
    • Ian Moody [:Kwan] (UTC+0)
    • Oriol Brufau [:Oriol]
    • Tim Nguyen :ntim
    • Vikas Prasad Mahato [:vikas_mahato]
    • jbonnafo
  • New contributors (🌟 = First Patch!)
    • 🌟 17039 made Sqlite.jsm’s getSchemaVersion() return an integer instead of a string
    • 🌟 Nathan updated the WebPayments code to use the recommended ESLint rules for Mozilla projects
    • Arjun Krishna Babu switched our Preferences tests to use BrowserTestUtils.waitForEvent instead of its own custom waitForEvent function
    • 🌟 dylan.turner updated a string in our Form Autofill code
    • 🌟 Vedant updated one of our graphical assets to be consistent with the new Photon tab style
    • 🌟 samreadingthompsondevelopment added the trailing commas requirement ESLint rule for the Migration component
    • 🌟 Ashish Daulatabad removed some ancient and unneeded Netscape 4-era code from nsOSHelperAppService.cpp!
    • Swapnil P (:DarthSwap) restricted BROWSER_*_DEFAULT probes to the parent-process only
    • Vinícius Costa replaced do_check_array_eq with Assert.deepEqual in the sync code
    • 🌟 william.loughton removed another unneeded XBL binding (menu-vertical)! Another one bites the dust!
    • 🌟 zacknoyes2 made it so that we set a “status” property on the Error raised when Sqlite.jsm’s openAsyncDatabase or asyncClone fails
    • 🌟 pubkeypin made it so that Preferences would open if MOZ_DATA_REPORTING wasn’t included in the build

Project Updates

Add-ons

• The tabs API now supports a captureTab method which can be passed a tabId to capture the visible area of the specified tab.
• The pageAction and sidebarAction APIs were updated to be consistent with changes to the browserAction API which allow for nulls to be passed to unset a property.
• The browserAction, pageAction and sidebarAction APIs all now support querying whether they are currently enabled/shown/open, respectively.
• The devtools.network API now supports a getHAR method which returns a HAR log for the devtools window.
• Special handling was added to support popups which will contain remote browsers.
• The tabs.saveAsPDF API was enhanced with a print progress listener and the addition of four more edge properties to the pageSettings object.
• The menus and contextMenus APIs have been enhanced to support onShown and onHidden events.
• A proxyConfig setting method has been added to the browserSettings API to allow an extension to control proxy prefs.

Activity Stream

• Priorities for Fx60 (what we are currently working on):
  • Prefs: migrating newtab sidebar preferences to about:preferences
    • Porting existing sections checkboxes from React to XUL
    • Adding new customizations: section rows, reorganize “Home” section
  • Highlights:  adding new data types starting with Pocketed items
  • Message Center:  generalizing messages and notifications
    • Start with Onboarding Tour and Snippets
    • Eventually for centralized notifications even for non-UI features
  • Perceived Performance:  developing process to produce weekly Activity Stream timing videos for analysing perf

Browser Architecture

• XUL flexbox emulation into CSS flexbox can be enabled with the layout.css.emulate-moz-box-with-flex pref. Next: get it running in automation to track performance compared with XUL flex (metabug)
• XUL overlay removal breakdown (metabug)
• There’s a new components.css UA sheet for migrating XBL <resource> sheets into (bug)

Firefox Core Engineering

• Policy Engine:
  • Policy engine has landed (behind a pref), as well as several policies:
    • Bug 1421707 – Blocking of selected about: pages
    • Bug 1428922 – Per-origin allow/block permissions for cookies, popups, flash and addons
    • Bug 1429120 – Show bookmarks and menu bar by default
    • Bug 1428141 – Don’t check for default browser on startup
  • Several others being worked on, as well as GPO support
  • Plenty of opportunities to help with our list of desired policies on MVP
• Crash pings have come to Fennec, courtesy of Gabriele Svelto

Lint

• Sylvestre is working on integrating codespell as a lint option.
  • Initially limited to tools/lint and python/mozlint

Mobile

• We shipped Firefox 10.4 for iOS which addresses performance issues in location bar autocomplete

• We are about to ship the first beta of Firefox 11.0 for iOS. Two bigger themes of this release will be Tracking Protection and iPad improvements

• We moved a testing tool, MappaMundi, from out of the main repo to a separate project — it is of general interest to iOS developers who use XCUITests. One of our engineers called it “The Missing Piece” of UI testing.

• Firefox for Fire TV 1.1 shipped, with Turbo Mode (e.g. tracking protection) and better Accessibility

Performance

• Tab warming
  • Fixed a perma-spinner bug with tab warming
  • Currently documenting the async tab switch to increase bus factor
  • One last bug to fix, and then I plan on enabling tab warming by default on Nightly
    • There are some Telemetry measurements to sort out too
• FormHistory database initialization and migration have been moved off of the main thread!

Privacy/Security

• Luke made Firefox trim HTTP Referer headers in private browsing mode.
• We now have more detailed telemetry on permission prompts. You can find out about the origin scheme of the triggering page, whether the prompt was triggered from a user input event and whether it came from a third-party iframe.

Search and Navigation

Address Bar & Search

• Fixed a bug where copying a search suggestion ended up pasting a url
• Work continues on the new Address Bar autofill algorithm, close to be reviewable

Places

• incremental_vacuum has been enabled for favicons.sqlite
• Removed the Move Bookmarks dialog from the Library
• Fixed a bug allowing to rename a bookmark tag to an empty string
• Removed the legacy synchronous places transactions.
• Removing synchronous transactions allowed us to start removing synchronous bookmarks APIs, the following have already been removed (more will follow): GetPageTitle, GetBookmarksForURI and GetMostRecentBookmarksForURI, GetItemType, ChangeBookmarkURI, GetBookmarkIdsForURI
• Hemant has replaced calls to isURIVisited and promiseIsURIVisited with the more appropriate PlacesUtils.history.hasVisits

More

• Contributed fixes to Sqlite.jsm:
  • zacknoyes2 added a status property to the OpenAsyncDatabase error that allows to check for corruption
  • 17039 made getSchemaVersion return an integer rather than a string

Sync / Firefox Accounts

• New and improved bookmark merging has landed! \o/
  • This is a significant under-the-hood change to how we apply synced bookmarks, and should fix long-standing issues with Sync scrambling bookmarks, smushing folders, and undoing changes.
  • Special thanks to :mak, :markh, :rnewman, and :tcsc for their reviews and guidance!
  • There’s an explainer doc with an overview.
  • We’ll begin dogfooding within the Sync team, and send out a post to firefox-dev@ once we’re ready to have more folks try. Bug 1433177 tracks enabling it by default.
  • If you’re feeling adventurous, you can back up your places.sqlite, flip the services.sync.engine.bookmarks.buffer pref, and restart Firefox.
• Edouard is almost done removing event loop spinning from Sync, which significantly cleans up the code and should make for cleaner perf profiles.
• Thom is improving bookmark deletion to avoid resurrecting deleted items. There’s a sync-dev@ thread with some discussion.
• Various performance improvements.

Test Pilot

• Tab Split and ThemesRFun experiment development is now underway.
• The Test Pilot team is learning about WebExtension API Experiments and Embedded Experiments for use implementing future Test Pilot experiments.
• Snooze Tabs is gearing up to graduate.
• MinVid is preparing to move into a Shield study.
• The Test Pilot website has new “Featured Experiment” UI which will be turned on in the next sprint.
• Screenshots:
  • Toolbar button vs Page Action menu: yes, we’re seeing less usage having moved the button there, but our usage has been remarkably steady:
    • 
  • screenshots is becoming a module. Ianb owner, 6a68 peer.
  • we’ve updated our dev process to land early in the cycle and avoid uplifts
  • Ian is participating in the github-bugzilla discussions, more to come

Web Payments

• Improved breakdown completed. Talking with stakeholders
• Line-item list view and toggle implemented
• Improving the shipping address picker
• Connecting the shipping address picker to the PaymentResponse
• Credit card picker is coming soon.