These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 37

Highlights

• Outreachy internships and GSoC projects have been announced!
  • You can find our Outreachy interns here
  • Google Summer of Code projects
• An Intent to Ship for tab warming on Windows and Linux for Firefox 61 should be going out today
  • Holding warming on Nightly for macOS until this bug is sorted.
• Our implementation of Same Site Cookies landed and was uplifted to Firefox 60.
• Our MSU students are wrapping up their semester working on the Dark Theme Darkening.
• Firefox for Fire TV will soon release v2.1, with polish, bug fixes, and better crash reporting.
• Firefox for iOS 11.1 will ship this week, with bug fixes for telemetry and properly handling opening new windows from scripts.
• Activity Stream now displays your most recent downloads in Highlights!

Friends of the Firefox team

• Resolved bugs (excluding employees):
  • More than one bug fixed: https://mzl.la/2qVHpbY
    • :prathiksha
    • Manish Kumar [:manishkk]
    • Michael Kohler [:mkohler]
    • Tim Nguyen :ntim
    • Vivek
  • New contributors (🌟 = First Patch!)
    • 🌟 Abdoulaye O. LY made it so that keyboard shortcut hints in the AppMenu are easier to see with the Dark Theme enabled
    • Amy fixed some inconsistencies in the Synced Tabs icons between the sidebar and the Page Action menu
    • 🌟 gilad.bau swapped all usage of BrowserUtils.makeURI to Services.io.newURI in Feeds.jsm
    • Issei Horie added a note to browser/app/permissions to make it clearer to our Data Stewardship when Data Collection Review is needed
    • 🌟 Jordan Hu added a test for Telemetry Histogram whitelists
    • 🌟 jason made it so that the MEMORY_DISTRIBUTION_AMONG_CONTENT probe is only collected in the parent process
    • 🌟 Maxim Kupfer made it so that the “Delete” key works again when deleting entries from the Saved Addresses list in about:preferences
    • 🌟 Michael Calabrese rewrote part of the TelemetryScalars backend to use nsPrintfCString to avoid some awkward string construction
    • 🌟 Jens Hausdorf made sure that the “What’s New” links from about:preferences opens in a new tab
    • 🌟 Sean Reeise updated a bunch of our Places tests to use some new async functions
    • 🌟 Sören Hentzschel made it so WebExtensions can access browser.display.use_document_fonts

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

• Andrew updated the docs, most importantly adding details on WebExtension experiments.
• Rob Wu (Rob), Luca, and Kris fixed some tests.
• (Quantum Lights was un-briefly-broken via backout on Mac.)
• jkt fixed contextualIdentities.update() so it now validates like create does.
• OOP WebExtension background scripts is on by default for Mac (thank you, Kris Maglione!)
• Kris continued to remove old legacy stuff (old API experiment support)
• Kris also fixed permissions in about:addons options browsers
• Markus Stange fixed initial size setting on some remote web extension panels on macOS
• Rob corrected Port.onDisconnect being fired with tabs.onAttached event
• Luca fixed tab crash and “chrome win is null“ on chrome.windows.create
• Shane created a browserSettings API to open awesomebar results in a new tab
• Shane also fixed an issue with an erroneous OAuth redirect determination in identity.launchWebAuthFlow
• Zombie (Tomislav) allowed Performance Timing to access cross-origin resources when the caller is a web extension that has permission
• Mark made it so that as of 61, users are notified when an extension changes their home page. This will probably need a tweak for distributions, like New Tab.
• Theming API changes:
  • WebExtension arrow panel border line (jaws)
  • Fixed a tab_selected bug when headerURL is not set (uplifted to 60) (ntim)
  • Removed sanitation of fully transparent values (also ntim)
  • Apply toolbar properties to findbar as well (bogdan)
• The march to removing support for bootstrapped extensions, aimed for 64, continues…

Activity Stream

• In Preferences > Home you can now choose which sources should display Highlights cards.
• The New Tab page now shows search engine icons (for defaults) in the search box.

Browser Architecture

• Tracking work to allow top-level HTML windows.
• Filed a spec bug for slight divergences in custom elements implementations.
• RKV proceeds with XULStore as a first testcase.
• Mentat now has an SDK for Android as well as iOS.

Lint

• Be aware: Intent to require Node 8.9.1 / npm 5.5.1 to run ESLint

Mobile

• Work for Firefox for iOS 12.0 is steadily moving forward, making progress on unifying our share extensions, and exposing Sync more prominently in the Application menu.

Fluent

• Migrated all Preferences DTD strings to Fluent
• Next: Continue with the long tail of .properties and imported-dtd
• Next (62):
  • Move document.l10n to nsIDocument
  • browser.fluent in System Addons
  • Pseudolocales
• Next (63): Live language installation and switching

Performance

• Content Process Optimizations
  • felipe has begun researching ways we can optimize content process start-up, and reduce the amount of script that needs to run
• Blocklist work
  • Gijs has made it so that we load the blocklist asynchronously in the vast majority of cases. Telemetry reports that > 99% of the blocklist loads reported are occurring asynchronously!
    • This is great for start-up, and responsiveness in general.
  • There’s a few bits of work to make blocklist fully asynchronous. One just landed on autoland. \o/
    • One tiny bit left after that (but Gijs hopes to have a patch for that today). Once that’s done, we aim to switch to using IndexedDB rather than loading the entire 150k XML file, which, even asynchronously, isn’t great for perf. Async-ification has to come first because IndexedDB fetch operations are always async.
• Blank first paint
  • florian fixed a black flash that occurred for some users when showing the blank first paint window
  • florian also fixed an issue where the blank window was actually slowing down start-up on Windows
• ContentPrefService off main thread
  • dthayer figured out the shutdown leak that was preventing the ContentPrefService to Sqlite.jsm patch from landing! A SpellChecker (of all things) patch is now awaiting review so that this whole thing can land.
  • Moving to Sqlite.jsm means that ContentPrefService initialization comes off of the main thread.
• LRU cache for tab layers
  • dthayer is now investigating an LRU cache to make most tab switches (not just warmed tabs) feel instantaneous.
• Lower-FPS throbber experiment
  • mconley is preparing a study to test the effects of lowered framerates for tab throbbers on page load time.
  • Ilana Segall is helping with definition and analysis, and waiting on a pre-requisite patch from hiro to land in central and get some testing.
• A layout flush from MousePosTracker that occurred most times the StatusPanel appeared (!) has been removed.
  • Fun times – this opened a tp5 responsiveness regression that is currently being investigated

Policy Engine

• Starting to evaluate new policies for next release
• Starting to see Enterprise-folks poking at the engine and testing it out

Privacy/Security

• We pref-ed off the storage option for indexedDB.open for web content. It continues to work for WebExtensions for now, but we’re planning to get rid of that in 62 as well.
• Baku & Johann finished up a big patch that fixes the way we’re clearing ServiceWorkers when users delete their history or site data.
• We removed all usage of unsafeSetInnerHTML, the only remaining user is the (to be removed) GCLI.
• Firefox Beta (and Edge and Chrome) had an on-stage demo of Web Authentication last Friday at RSA 2018. (WebAuthn ships in 60)
• TLS 1.3 updated to Draft 28 in Firefox 61.
  • Also, TLS 1.3 is being rolled out gradually to all Firefox Release users (Bug 1442042).

Search and Navigation

Address Bar & Search

• The placeholder in the address bar now will display the search engine name.
• about:newtab will now display the icon of the engine you’re searching with.

Places

• Landed some changes to fix up broken built-in root folders (missing roots, bad parents)
• Improved performance of download transitions query by not refreshing it for every update of history.
• Removed the nsINavBookmarks::GetDescendantFolders API
• Sean helped us rewrite some tests to use a better test-only API for adding history visits.

Sync / Firefox Accounts

• Dave Hunt is working on adding TPS to Mach and TaskCluster, with the goal of running Sync integration tests as Tier-2 on infra. 📝

Test Pilot

• Lots of focus on mobile in this quarter: Notes app is pre alpha, working with relman on a release pipeline
• New experiment launch dates are June 1 for Color and Side View

Web Payments

• The team has completed 58% of the Milestones 1 – 3 Backlog.
• The majority of the Payment Request code now uses ES modules!
• Marcos attended W3C Web Payments meetings last week

This week I learned

Below the fold

• [mconley] Did you know that we have test coverage data for mozilla-central? Here, for example.
  • /browser is at 69.30%
  • /toolkit is at 68.51%
• [mossop] JS implemented WebIDL is being deprecated