Highlights
- We released two blog posts that outline our product and platform strategy against trackers and other annoyances:
- Changing Our Approach to Anti-tracking
- Why we need better tracking protection
- Also worth reading: An (unofficial) blog post on the matter by Ehsan: On leveling the playing field and online tracking
- The DevTools team got some goodies landed in Firefox 63:
- Accessibility Panel is now enabled by default!

Try it on your own site!
- We now have better error messages in the console when attempting to access null or undefined properties

That code looked alright to me.
- The Font Editor is now available
- WebComponents are easier to work with! Check out this blog post about that, and try some examples!
Friends of the Firefox team
Resolved bugs (excluding employees)
- Fixed more than one bug
- Abdoulaye O. LY
- Arshad Kazmi
- Florens Verschelde
- Manish [:manishkk]
- Oriol Brufau [:Oriol]
- Sören Hentzschel
- Tim Nguyen :ntim
- New contributors (🌟 = first patch)
- Anushi Maheshwari[:Anushi1998] improved the formatting of some of our in-tree Telemetry documentation
- 🌟 arika.arnzen cleaned up some of our CSS by combining two identical selectors and their rules
- Siddhant [:Siddhant085] made it so that exporting bookmarks respects the browser.bookmarks.max_backups pref
- 🌟 Jason Chapin removed an obsolete PNG image
- 🌟 Hemakshi Sachdev made it so that cached data is not included in the total transferred data calculation in the Network Monitor
- 🌟 Tushar Arora [:tushararora] fixed the menus WebExtension API so that browser.menus.update can update icons as well
- 🌟 Yash Johar updated the Responsive Design Mode icon in our DevTools
Project Updates
Add-ons / Web Extensions
- Extensions can now access the attention property on tabs, and can set the highlighted property from browser.tabs.update().
- Extensions can now be uninstalled directly from a right-click on their toolbar icon. The “Manage Extension” link in the same context menu also got fixed.
- Menus created by extensions can now update their icons and be hidden.
- Themes can now change the sidebar border color.
Activity Stream
- Pocket team is working on a new version of the personalization engine
- Working on getting the Contextual Feature Recommender and the new version of Snippets based on Activity Stream Router ready for experiments
Browser Architecture
- Work on Mentat is paused
- UCOSP students working on removing XUL from about:config.
Developer Tools
- GCLI removed as of Sept. 5, 2018
- :yulia gave a great presentation on fission to the team
- Enhancements to RDM in collaboration with WebCompat team
- support viewport render mode, :bradwerth
- :gl about to land support for custom UA
- DevTools UX workweek kicked off design system (live) work
Fluent
- document.l10n WebIDL has landed!
- Fluent available in all system principals documents
- No need for <script src=”chrome://global/content/l10n.js”/>
- Next steps – enable non-system principals, and web extensions
Lint
- Comma-dangle landed for browser/, services/, taskcluster/ toolkit/
- Dave Townsend enabled the no-sequences rule, which caught a few mistakes and some errors in test files.
- The main configuration is now based on eslint:recommended.
- There were a few useful recommended rules we didn’t have enabled, so they are now.
- A few other rules from the recommended configuration are turned off, but we’ll look into enabling them soon.
Mobile
- Focus 7.x WebView/GeckoView A/B experiment is live!
- Teaser: Dan Callahan has a related post ready to go for later this week. Stay tuned!
- 🎉 Release: Android Components 0.22
Performance
- Greg Tatum
- Screenshots and Network information now deployed in the Timeline – Profile example

Gecko Profiler: We just really like to watch the browser being slow.
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-
- Turn on the screenshots feature in the add-on dropdown:
- Mac OS only (help may be needed for additional platform support)
- Make sure WebRender is not enabled.
- Turn on the screenshots feature in the add-on dropdown:
-
- Importing other formats (experimental previews)
- Linux’s perf:
- Chrome profiles:
- florian
- Working with Tarek and Bryan Bell from UX to figure out how best to expose more powers to users in about:performance
- Now that the concept has proven itself, we’re looking to see what we need to do to ship this thing to users.
- Working with Tarek and Bryan Bell from UX to figure out how best to expose more powers to users in about:performance
- dthayer
- Landed a fix to the background tab process manager to make sure it only impacts web content processes.
- mconley and dthayer are testing enabling the background tab process manager. If all goes well, we might try to enable it just on Nightly to see how it shakes out.
- You can test it yourself on Windows by creating a new pref, dom.ipc.processPriorityManager.enabled, and setting it to true.
- Has patches up to shift more code over to the new batched Places observer API
- Has a patch up to get rid of some hashtable lookups and mallocs when using SVG and CSS filters
- Landed a fix to the background tab process manager to make sure it only impacts web content processes.
- felipe
- Has some try builds up with the beginnings of the Photon tab animations
- Still very much a WIP, but it’s great to see tab animations come off of the main thread!
- Has some try builds up with the beginnings of the Photon tab animations

Unfortunately, the GIF is running at 30fps and doesn’t do the smoothness justice.
- Gijs
- Made Windows Taskbar preview code do less work when restoring a large session
- Slogging through the work to make our <browser>’s not load useless about:blank pages when we know they’re going to go somewhere else.
- mconley
- Working with dao to find the best way to avoid doing layout flushes when calculating how to display our tabs in the titlebar
- Re-enabled / renewed a bunch of perf-related Telemetry probes that were about to expire
- Working on renewing a bunch of other perf-related Telemetry probes as well.
Privacy/Security
- Shipping Shield Studies for FastBlock and Cookie Restrictions
- Vinoth is working on removing all usage of eval() with system privileges.
- Firefox Monitor shipped as a system add-on to 62.0 en_US users. Testing – pref’d on for 0.5% via Normandy.
Search and Navigation
Address Bar & Search.
- Gijs changed url canonization to make it more coherent across browsers and platforms. CTRL+enter is now used to canonize words to urls, it’s no more possible to canonize to .net or .org, but the suffix can be controlled with “browser.fixup.alternate.suffix”. A new pref “browser.urlbar.ctrlCanonizesURLs” allows to use ctrl to open in a new tab instead.
- Fixed a regression where unvisited bookmarks were not autofilled anymore after a Clear History.
- Improved the highlight on Top Sites Search Shortcuts to be applied more consistently
- Fixed a few url overflow and cursor issues after recent changes to the overflow behavior
- Firefox now accepts both “application/json” and “application/x-suggestions+json” as MIME types for OpenSearch Suggestions
- Fixed a regression where locale specific Search Engines could re-appear after being hidden by the user
Places
- Removed some more legacy code
- Fixed a bug where sites with bogus (empty) favicon <link>s would not get a favicon
Test Pilot
- Ops is going to be using Send as the first test of hosting on GCP
- Screenshots: bootstrap removal patch is under review (on github)
- Thanks to :aswan for moving the enable/disable pref observer code to nsBrowserGlue (bug 1488971)
Web Payments
- Completed highlights
- PaymentResponse.retry() method
- Card network dropdown on the credit card add/edit screen (affects form autofill as well)
- Bunch of error page and form validation fixes
- Change autofill storage’s APIs to be async
- In Progress
- Bug 1429181 – Credit card network validation on entry and summary pages
- Bug 1481972 – Support all countries in form autofill preferences for use by Payment Request
- Bug 1480717 – Credit card form can be saved without a billing address
- Bug 1472026 – Implement PaymentResponse.prototype.onpayerdetailchange
- Bug 1463545 – Replace grid layout of <rich-option> subclasses with new UI spec
- Bug 1486954 – Encrypt credit card numbers with OS key store instead of Master Password
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