Firefox/Meeting/05-Jun-2018

Today’s meeting leader is: mikedeboer

General Topics / Roundtable

• [mikedeboer] PSA: bootstrapped extensions are planned to be removed in Fx 65
  • Discussion in firefox-dev mailing list
• [RyanVM] Last real week for Fx61-targeted patches!
• [dmose] First basic NodeJS support/requirement landing soon (bug 1464123)
  • Previously discussed in Intent To Require threads in dev-builds/dev-platform
  • Forthcoming post to firefox-dev, dev-builds, dev-platform
  • No NPM or Yarn support yet

Friends of the Firefox team

Introductions

• [mconley] Emma Malysz! Mentored by Neil Deakin, working on some XBL removal stuff, and ultimately going to work on the content-select project
• [jaws] Abdoulaye O. Ly is working on the tab-multiselect project
• [jaws] Tim Nguyen is working on completing the Theming API MVP

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

• More than one bug fixed:
  • Michael Kohler [:mkohler]
  • Oriol Brufau [:Oriol]
• New contributors (🌟 = First Patch!)
  • Alex swapped out some hand-rolled promiseTopicObserved functions with TestUtils.topicObserved in some of our testing code
  • 🌟lucas05 got rid of an unnecessary constant variable in some of our browser.js code
  • 🌟 Michael Calabrese made some of our Telemetry code use locking in a safer way

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

• A schedule for the removal of bootstrapped extensions was announced.
• Addon Manager cleanup continued, also fallout from earlier cleanup got fixed.
• Extensions with toolbar buttons can now be managed directly from the context menu on the button.
• WebExtensions that use sidebars can now opt out of having them shown when the extension is installed.
• WebExtensions can now get details about a TLS channel and certificates with the webRequest API.
• Patches to change the storage API to use IndexedDB bounced but shut be landing soon.
• Hidden tabs are now visible in the History menu.
• Themes can now set the tab separator color.
• A few bugs related to moving tabs between windows were fixed.

Activity Stream

• Now using blobs instead of data URIs, thanks Jay!
• Experiment in Beta 61 for our new message architecture (now delivering snippets) doc here
• AS will now fetch strings from l10n-central
• New Compact cards
  • 

Browser Architecture

• Style overlay removal has r+.
• Come say hi at the developer faire next Friday.

Lint

• Assert.rejects/Assert.throws requiring the second “expected” argument will soon be enabled for everywhere ESLint is enabled.
  • Soon to be replaced by a hard requirement in Assert.jsm.

Fluent

• No updates this week.

Performance

• imjching landed a patch in Activity Stream that switches all non-Recommended Stories images to use Blob URLs rather than DataURLs
  • This should save content process memory, lower the overhead of sending those images down, and allow us to skip the DataURL parsing that happens on the content side of things
• dthayer has concluded the LRU cache experiment and disabled it in Nightly.
  • This definitely has a positive impact on tab switch time. \o/
    • 
  • It introduces a number of behavioural glitches, and adds (unsurprising) memory overhead that we think we can improve upon
• Early first blank paint has been disabled on Beta on Windows, and is being held to Nightly. UX is hoping we can make some slight modifications, and we’re waiting on a spec. Experiment is still underway though, as UR feels that it’s still a useful data point.
• felipe got us some wins on both memory and start-up speed for content processes by making lots of our frame scripts lazier!

• mconley figured out the cpstartup Talos regression that occurs when removing the empty scrollbar XBL binding, and has patches.
  • Sordid details
  • Bounced once, now dealing with shutdown leaks

Policy Engine

• Kanika (outreachy intern) working on new policies.

Privacy/Security

• No updates this week.

Search and Navigation

Address Bar & Search

• Fixed most of the performance and functional bugs for the new address bar autofill algorithm. We’re investigating a few edge cases where origins are not being filled, if you have any please report in bug 1464154.
• Increase diversity in address bar results:
  • Changed input (aka adaptive) history expiration and limits to avoid dominating all the address bar results
  • Working on a similar improvement for remote tabs
• More clean-up of the search service:
  • Search engines out of langpacks (on autoland)
  • List.txt support has been removed (moved to list.json)
  • Browser.search.order has been moved to list.json

Places

• Landed the first parts of the redesign of the edit bookmarks panel
• Removed the bookmark description UI
  • The actual description data will be removed in Firefox 64, needs a relnote
• Folder queries are now using guids instead of ids
• Added support for Objects and Arrays to PlacesUtils.metadata

Other

•  :mstange added SQL queries to the profiler stack labels, when a statement is being executed

Sync / Firefox Accounts

• No updates this week.

Test Pilot

• A reminder that Test Pilot is available for Firefox feature work that could benefit from iteration before landing in Firefox.
• Upcoming experiments (now delayed till July 10th, to accommodate 61 releasing tomorrow, June 6th):
  • Firefox Color: lightweight theming experiment
  • Side View: mobile view in the sidebar
• Upcoming Shield studies:
  • Cloud Storage: Dropbox / Google Drive integration into Download menu
    • Waiting on StudyUtils v5, release in a couple weeks
• Screenshots updates:
  • Trying to switch to from Photon page action to WebExtension pageAction, but there might be a performance regression as a result (will be tracked in 1466575)
• Test Pilot experiment backlog: https://airtable.com/tblcYzZuTMBfLFlvq/viwfgfhRAYVntsFbJ
  • If you can’t add to that list (and I don’t think everyone has account access to Airtable) you can email John Gruen jgruen@mozilla.com

Web Payments

• Prathiksha has almost finished implementing the onboarding flow! She is starting work on using <select> for our dropdowns to get native popup/keyboard behaviour.
• MattN is working on polishing l10n and visual styles in preparation for QA review.
• Jared is working on CreditCard.jsm to unify credit card number validation/parsing
• Sam is working on normalizing temporary address/card profiles like we do for saved ones and add tests for .updateWith()

This week I learned

Meeting Leader Rotation

Add your name below if you want to be in the rotation of leaders:

• mconley
• johannh
• kitcambridge
• MattN
• RyanVM
• felipe
• mikedeboer
• 6a68