These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 40

Highlights

• Nightly builds of Focus / Klar (with GeckoView) are now available!
• Introducing Firefox Monitor, a new security tool we’re testing to help keep track of data breaches on the Web!
• The certificate error pages have been redesigned to provide information more clearly to the user: explain what the issue is and offer the user the option to return to safety

  • 

    Warning: New Certificate Page Designs Ahead!

• Most Policy Engine policies that were ESR-only (except for Search) have been modified so that can be used on the Rapid-Release channel
• The first version of the Federated Learning add-on has been completed by Florian Hartmann, which that will allow us to study and improve matching in the Address Bar without violating user privacy. Read this blog post for more details.
• We’re working on the redesigning the bookmarking panel to show richer favicons and preview images.

  • 

    We’re updating the much-beloved bookmarking panel!

• Our first Test Pilot experiments for Mobile are coming soon!
  • ✨ 🎉 Lockbox for iOS launching July 10 🎉 ✨
  • ✨ 🎉 Notes for Android launching July 10 🎉 ✨
• Privacy UI redesign v1 landed, v2 in progress for 63!
  • 

    Tracking Protection: ON

    

    Tracking Protection controls are right near your fingertips.

Friends of the Firefox team

Introductions

• Vicky Chin, managing Firefox Performance across both Desktop and Mobile (spiritual successor to the Quantum Flow team)

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

• More than one bug fixed
  • Abdoulaye O. LY
  • Issei Horie [:is2ei]
  • Richard Marti (:Paenglab)
• New contributors (🌟 = First Patch!)
  • 🌟 Kiran made our Telemetry histogram testing more robust
  • 🌟 Liam removed the obsolete async / sync blocklist probe, since the blocklist is now always loaded asynchronously
  • lucas05 got rid of an unnecessary null check in browser.js
  • 🌟 Pavan Veginati got rid of some unnecessary logging in our sync code
  • 🌟 Rob Hoelz fixed a Places bug that would make it difficult to delete a keyword entry
  • 🌟 sahith.reddy got rid of some unused l10n strings from browser.dtd

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

• Internal extensions (e.g., screenshots) regained the ability to run content scripts on the PDF viewer.
• The tabs API has been updated to understand tab multiselect.
• An API for working with search engines is close to landing.
• Extension-defined keyboard shortcuts can now use more combinations of modifier keys.
• Support for automatically updating LWTs to WebExtension themes landed.  AMO will automatically migrate existing LWTs some time next month.
• Permission notifications from extension pages now display the extension name.
• Bugs related to delayed startup and storage API migration to indexedDB were fixed.
• Migration of existing bootstrapped extensions is creeping along.

Activity Stream

• Worked around an issue where Activity Stream completely fails to load with IndexedDB not working for ~half a percent of release users and uplifted to 61.0.1
• Nothing visual and shiny
  • A code mirroring PR that gets us one step closer to being a Firefox component (tracking) and allows developing directly from mozilla-central
  • Enabled CSP previously was Report-Only
  • Pieces from a bigger bug to use ScriptPreloader Cache
  • Various about:welcome fixes for Beta 62 experiments

Browser Architecture

• PSA: Upcoming regressions – XBL Replacement Newsletter Special Edition (read more on firefox-dev)
• XML pretty printing now uses Shadow DOM when available instead of XBL in the content process (bug). Planning to extend this with the “UA Shadow DOM” for other in-content widgets (videocontrols, plugin click to play, etc).

Fluent

• Pseudolocales landed!
• Ongoing work to enable Fluent in unprivileged contexts and on the startup path

Performance

• dthayer landed the Places observer redesign, which will help speed up places operations, and is working to improve texture handling in our macOS graphics stack.
• felipe has been working on more content process startup improvements, and ensuring we don’t regress them
• florian is working on about:performance improvements
• imjching is working on moving Activity Stream’s new tab page to its own content process
• imjching is also working on using the JS ScriptLoader cache to improve content process startup when it loads activity stream
• Gijs landed another change to make blocklist processing faster
• mconley is working on reducing extraneous paints we’re doing

Policy Engine

• Additional authentication prefs have been added
• Ongoing work by our Outreachy Intern Kanika on a new about:policies page

Privacy/Security

• Privacy UI improvements (metabug): starting to work on v2 for 63

Search and Navigation

Address Bar & Search

• The Search Service is now caching the distribution id
• Proposal to support “application/json” as well as “application/x-suggestions+json” as MIME types for Suggestions in OpenSearch
• Fixed long UI hangs caused by the new autofill triggers
• Fixed a longstanding bug with autofill overriding bookmark keywords in the Address Bar
• Work is in progress to fix some inconsistencies of the new autofill algorithm
• Peter Simonyi has improved address bar suggestions with using a bookmark keyword, adding historical results to it

Places

• Fixed a possible bookmarks dataloss introduced in Firefox 61, affecting profiles with incoherent bookmark roots. Fix will be in 61.0.1
• Removed the “Open bookmark in sidebar” feature
• Remove more more dead code driving the old bookmark descriptions
• Default “smart bookmark” queries won’t be inserted anymore in new profiles
• Fixed a bug where history views were missing a day when grouped by date

Application Services (Sync / Firefox Accounts / Push)

• Ethan landed a client for Megaphone 🦊📣, a service for broadcasting “tickles” to all Firefoxes. We’ll use Megaphone for real-time app and blocklist updates, and other places where we currently use polling.
• Edouard landed a client for Firefox Accounts Commands ⏰, an extension of the FxA device manager to support features like lower-latency “new send tab”.
• Thom working on FFI changes in the new Rust Sync adapter 🦀.
• Carol is porting “Sandvich”, the Rust Sync integration app, to Android 🌭.
• Thom also wrote up a thorough analysis on Mentat binary size, as part of the Rust Sync work 🤔.
• Mark landed an option to clear local data when signing out of Sync 🙈.
• Lina is squashing remaining bugs in new bookmark sync 📚.

Test Pilot

• Test Pilot & Screenshots H2 planning underway

Web Payments

• Very productive meetings at SF All Hands with UX and Engineering to refine and track the remaining scope required before enabling on Nightly.
• Team has completed 84% of the entire Milestone 1 – 3 Backlog.
• There have been quite a few recent specification changes (e.g. payment method and payer events) that are also getting implemented in Gecko thanks to Marcos and mrbkap.
• Sam is working on implementing a timeout error page.
• Jared required essential address fields and added country-specific Postal Code validation.
• Prathiksha is switching our dropdowns to use <select> behind the scenes.
• MattN is working on visual polish to match the visual spec.