These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 38

Highlights

• The tab hiding WebExtension API is now enabled by default in 61
  • If you miss Tab Groups, try this WebExtension
  • mstriemer made it so we show a doorhanger the first time an extension hides a tab

• We intend to ship Early blank first paint in Firefox 61 (Windows only – Linux held to early beta for feedback, not shipping on macOS)
• Firefox should be getting a bit of a start-up performance boost soon, because
  • Gijs has made all exposed blocklist APIs async! 🎉
  • dthayer got the ContentPrefService to init off of the main thread! 🥂

Friends of the Firefox team

Introductions

• :Prathiksha Guruprasad will be working on the PaymentRequest MVP during her internship.
• Jay Lim (:imjching) will be working on Activity Stream performance bugs for the Performance team
• Emily Hou will be working on the Firefox Send experiment on the Test Pilot team this summer.
• Shruti Singh will be working on the Firefox Color experiment on the Test Pilot team this summer.

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

• More than one bug fixed:
  • Aditya Bharti [:adbugger]
  • Issei Horie
  • Oriol Brufau [:Oriol]
  • Tim Nguyen :ntim
• New contributors (🌟 = First Patch!)
  • Maxim Kupfer made it so that the Form Auto-fill doorhanger can send you to the right place in about:preferences via the “Spotlight” feature
  • Vidit23 removed the unused “unread” attribute from tabs
  • Jose Choy removed the console.log.bind pattern from Screenshots

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

• Themes: ntim added default_locale support to theme manifests.
• Out of process: the URLbar gets focus in fullscreen, now that OOP is pref’d on in Mac by default (in 61).
• Performance: there was a performance issue in web extensions storage, fixed upstream in kinto 11.1.2 and fixed in 61.
• Langpacks: gandalf/zibi fixed a bug in langpacks version support.
• Security: jkt fixed bug in webextension experiments so that system add-ons are now correctly identified as privileged.
• Proxy: mixedpuppy fixed it so that proxy extensions can now start before requests bypass them.
• Random: last but not least, there was some cleanup and a regression fix from mixedpuppy, and three test fixes from jorgk, kmag, and one we’ll credit to aswan.

Activity Stream

• Activity Stream Router (snippets and onboarding notification replacement) has started to land various pieces

Browser Architecture

• A preference landed to allow opening the browser console as a top-level html document. Still some things to fix.
• Landed our first XBL -> custom element conversion. May be backed out 🙁
• Overlay code removal is ready to go
• RKV proof of concept for XULStore is almost complete

Lint

• ESLint has been enabled on testing/mochitest
• Node/npm minimum version requirement bumps have landed on autoland.

Fluent

• Continuous migration of Preferences .properties to Fluent
• nsIDocument patch in works by :mossop
  • Expose Fluent in all UI

Mobile

• Firefox for Fire TV will soon release v3.0, which will include our Pocket Video Feed

• Focus Android 5.0 will launch soon!

Performance

• Intent to Ship in 61
  • Tab warming (Windows and Linux)
• Now that the blocklist is async, Gijs is following up by switching us over to indexeddb to get away from the awful giant-XML-file parsing backend we have now (which is slow).
• The overflowing customizable toolbar no longer causes sync layout flushes! 😎
  • Celebratory tweet
• dthayer got the ContentPrefService to init off of the main thread! 🥂
• Coming up next
  • felipe is working on a framework to make it easier to load frame scripts lazily
  • dthayer:
    • is working on an LRU cache for tab layers to try to further improve tab switch performance
    • is also working on reducing flicker when restoring a session with pinned tabs
    • is looking to remove the old chromehangs thread that nobody seems to need anymore (because we have BHR instead)
    • is starting to dig into a macOS graphics optimization that should improve performance sending things to the GPU
  • Gijs is looking to improve the layout and rendering performance of the AwesomeBar
  • mconley is kicking off a study to determine if lower fps tab throbbers can result in faster page loads for some users. Study is being reviewed this Wednesday.

Policy Engine

• No code updates. Getting marketing ready for launch. 👏
• Outreachy intern starting next week to work on new policies.

Privacy/Security

• Christoph is continuing to explore different ways to make our front-end communication between chrome and content scripts more predictable, consistent and secure. We are now looking into using RemotePageManager instead of AboutCapabilities for this.
• Vinoth is working on applying CSPs to content privileged about: pages.

Search and Navigation

Address Bar & Search

• Improved autofill algorithm is about to land:
• It is no more based on the flaky “typed visit” concept, but rather uses a frecency threshold (more adaptive)
• Fills origins (included port) rather than just hosts
• Improved the Wikipedia search plugin icon
• Fixed One-Click search engine to properly use POST, when requested, the first time after each browser start.
• be aware of bug 1457520 – POST requests and POST data don’t survive process switches

Places

• Kit Cambridge fixed a case where old profiles could be missing dateAdded/lastModified of bookmarks (breaking some WebExtension API assumptions)
• Yury Khan is making browser.tabs.loadBookmarksInTabs reuse current tab if it is blank
• Bringing the Async History API project to completion:
  • Removed the PlacesUtils.asyncHistory accessor (use PlacesUtils.history instead)
  • Working on removing history.hasHistoryEntries
  • Also working on removing nsIBrowserHistory
    • Adjusting the arguments of history.removeByFilter
    • Fixing a patch contributed by :jakhem converting calls to nsIBrowserHistory

Sync / Firefox Accounts

• No updates this week. New shiny Sync in Rust for mobile coming soon, more to share in two weeks! 🦀

Test Pilot

• New experiments launching in early June!
• Interns starting later this month!
• Screenshots product updates:
  • Annotation tools coming soon: undo, redo, and text/emoji
  • We’re thinking about what a mobile flow would feel like for Screenshots; PRD in flight. Ping jgruen with all your feature requests.
• Screenshots engineering:
  • Bug fix release 32.1.0 landed recently (1454029)
  • A security fix regressed Screenshots working on PDF pages.  This is being tracked for Firefox 60 in bug 1456485.
  • We have a working Chrome add-on with a few substantial bugs. Work is continuing.
  • We would like to take over the Ctrl + Shift + S keyboard shortcut from devtools. They will be investigating usage frequency of this and other shortcuts in bug 1456984.

Web Payments

• Team has completed 66% of the Milestone 1 – 3 Backlog.
• Planning telemetry requirements
• Code moved to browser/ and component moved to Firefox (from Toolkit)
• Can now add and edit shipping addresses from the PaymentRequest dialog
  • Jared is working on adding/editing billing addresses
• Sam is working on support for one-time-use addresses
• Matt is working with UX on options for rich dropdown menus