Categories: News Uncategorized

These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 41

Highlights

Screenshot of context menu in tab bar with multiple tabs selected

Screenshot of new tracking protection animation for a site in the identity block

    • AwesomeBar autocomplete fixes have been uplifted to 62. Please help us test it by reporting bugs where you’d expect an origin to be autofilled, because you use it often, but it’s not.
    • Test Pilot launched two new Mobile experiments
      • Notes:
        • Shipped on Android. Up next, we’re triaging, responding to early feedback and meeting with the Applications Services team to figure out next steps for the Notes experiment.
      • Firefox Lockbox:
        • Released to the public on July 10th, 2018 at 6 AM Pacific via Test Pilot
        • Social media response (Twitter, Hacker News, Reddit) relatively positive!
        • Starting small with just a few English-only countries, will get feedback and roll out to more regions and languages soon
        • Future: update Firefox Accounts OAuth integration, iOS 12 autofill support
        • Next week: we kick-off Android app planning!
      • Firefox Screenshots is getting new annotation features this week (undo/redo, and add text/emoji 🎉👍😎)

Friends of the Firefox team

  • Kanika Saini is working on about:policies and other parts of our Policy Engine!
  • More than one bug fixed
    • Abdoulaye O. LY
    • Manish Kumar [:manishkk]
  • New contributors (🌟 = First Patch!)

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

Activity Stream

Lint

Performance

In progress

  • dthayer
  • florian
    • Working on beefing up about:performance

Screenshot of new about:performance view showing dispatch counts and memory usage

Done

Policy Engine

Screenshot of new about:policies view showing policies table

Privacy/Security

Anti-Tracking

Firefox Monitor

Search and Navigation

Address Bar & Search

Places

Other

  • Fixed a formfill autocomplete bug on the Google login page. Formfill will now act on keydown, rather than keypress, disallowing pages from bypassing it.
  • There is a known issue on Windows 10 with the Antimalware Service slowing down the system when Firefox is running. A new Defender version, expected to solve the problem, should be available in the next weeks.
  • SQLite now uses an exclusive locking vfs on Linux. This prevents some SIGBUS crashes and makes SQLite work more reliably on nfs filesystems. On the other side, it’s not possible anymore to access SQLite databases while Firefox is running. If you work with SQLite in Linux and need concurrent access to debug, you can create a boolean storage.multiProcessAccess.enabled pref and restart the browser.

Application Services (Sync / Firefox Accounts / Push)

  • Carol fixed the threading model in the FxA client component for Fenix 🎻.
  • Ed is removing dependencies on C libraries in Sync.next, preferring pure Rust libraries where possible 🦀.
  • Thom is continuing to work on a Sync Logins API in Rust for Lockbox 🔐.
  • Mark is working on a strategy for shipping the Sync.next Rust library in products 🚢.
  • Lina fixed a bug where moving bookmarks between folders wouldn’t move them on other devices, and changed the bookmarks mirror to be snappier 📚.

Test Pilot

  • Side View:
    • A Firefox blog post drove about 10k new installs last week 🎉
    • Interesting note: Side View is the 4th iteration of an idea that started out as a pre-57 XUL Overlay addon. Donovan recounts its history in a new blog post
  • Color:
    • Les has been live coding while he works on adding custom background image support (inspired by mconley :-). Check it out on twitch or youtube
    • John has been working on palette generators
    • Design intern Vicky is working on a complete UX overhaul for Color so we can replace Personas Plus which will be retiring soon.
  • Send:
    • Working with Platform to allow much larger file transfers via the WritableStream API. We hope to release a completely overhauled product experience when Streams are pref’d on in Firefox.
    • Donovan has a working demo of Send for Android
  • Test Pilot platform:
    • Closed a ton of last minute bugs to make sure mobile launches were successful.
    • Special high fives to Jess, Jesslyn, Cherry, Sylvestre, Devin, and Sandy for helping make our latest launch successful
  • Screenshots:
    • Heartbeat study is complete; talking with Teon on Friday about the results
    • Talking with devtools about screenshots integration

Web Payments

  • Prathiksha landed native <select> dropdowns. Dropdowns are going to be polished in a follow-up patch.
  • Sam is implementing error pages and handling the user closing the dialog with the native window controls, on platforms except macOS.
  • Jared is breaking down work required to continue using a window modal PaymentRequest dialog for the MVP so we can compare to the effort required to build a new tab-modal widget.
  • MattN reports that header and footer visual polish has landed. The team is now working on payment card add/edit page improvements.

Screenshot of new Web Payment request window, with shipping address picker expanded

Below the fold

  • Keep up with developments in other browsers by following @intenttoship, @ChromiumDev, and @MSEdgeDev!
  • Remember Services.[c|p]pmm.initialProcessData? Introducing Services.[c|p]pmm.sharedData, a better solution!
    • Key-value store stashed in shared memory, instead of cloned to each content process
    • Read/Write in parent, Read-only in content
    • Decoded lazily
    • Sync’d to content on idle (with change events firing on the message manager to let you know what updated)
  • Check out Prathiksha’s intern presentation about her work on Web Payments!

One comment on “These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 41”

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  1. Robert Ab wrote on

    Just about ExtensionStorageIDB / indexedDB.

    There is still not fixed bug 944918 (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=944918). This bug is causing problems for WebExtensions using this database storage, like Tab Session Manager (Seniori is a developer of this WE):
    https://github.com/sienori/Tab-Session-Manager/wiki/IndexedDB-Error
    https://github.com/sienori/Tab-Session-Manager/issues/210
    https://github.com/sienori/Tab-Session-Manager/issues/222
    https://github.com/sienori/Tab-Session-Manager/issues/239
    https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=944918#c25
    https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=944918#c37

    Can you help?

    Reply

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