Firefox/Meeting/10-May-2016

Actions from last meeting

• Investigate who can use @supports -moz-bool-pref("bacon.enabled") from bug 1259889
• This only works for UA stylesheets, not author ones: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1259889#c37
• A follow-up was filed for usage from chrome author stylesheets: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1267890

General Topics / Roundtable

(tips/tricks/FYI, productivity improvements, industry news)

• [MattN] PSA: https://telemetry.mozilla.org only includes opt-in payloads
• E.g. compare fx_migration_entry_point on https://telemetry.mozilla.org and https://sql.telemetry.mozilla.org/queries/304#503
• [MattN] Related, somewhat old news: Telemetry data can be queried with SQL at https://sql.telemetry.mozilla.org
• Employees can "Log In with Google". Not sure about access for non-employees.
• Example: https://sql.telemetry.mozilla.org/dashboard/fx_migration
• fhr-dev list and #telemetry can help if there are questions
• [MattN] I made various improvements to https://mnoorenberghe.github.io/bz-dependency-buglist/
• Descendants of P-/M- are again hidden when M-/P- are hidden
• This is useful for excluding subtrees from a project
• Discussion about GTK3 regressions on firefox-dev. Main takeaway is that backwards incompatible GTK changes were in version 3.20 so that's why we're seeing new issues.
• [past] RFC: backspace should go back on all platforms, including Linux
• [mconley] A restyling of MozReview is underway. Screenshots are in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1056377
• Also, close to being able to r- stuff - see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1197879
• [mconley] I'm doing a talk on Reading and Interpreting Gecko Profiles (for make better glorious faster Firefox) in London. Timeslot and other details soon.
• [paolo] For those with Mana access, https://mana.mozilla.org/wiki/display/PM/Taipei+Development+Center+Projects complements the https://mana.mozilla.org/wiki/display/PM/Firefox+Program page
• [mconley] Platform is piloting a UI Team. daleharvey and I are tasked with taking some of the platform load off of you fine folks.
• [Tim] Front-end in Taipei would probably work on some of these if the Platform work happens in Taipei.
• [Pike] updates from the l10n team: flod's your point of contact, https://blog.mozilla.org/l10n/2016/05/05/new-directions-for-the-mozilla-l10n-drivers/

Friends of the Firefox team

(Give a shoutout/thanks to people for helping fix and test bugs. Introductions)

• Resolved bugs (excluding employees): http://mzl.la/1VRlNJ3
• More than one bug fixed:
• Nobody :-( Find mentored bugs at http://www.joshmatthews.net/bugsahoy/?internals=1&ff=1&unowned=1

Project Updates

Add-ons

• Pref to use unsigned add-ons was removed in 47

E10s

• [mconley] Preliminary 47 beta experiment data has come in.
• For the beta 1, there was an APZ-related crash that was dominating the charts, and a fix was uplifted for beta 2.
• For beta 2, we now know that the e10s (content+main) crashy-ness is about at 2x that of non-e10s (thumbnail+main).
• Preliminary data suggests that 85% of the extra content process crashes for e10s are intentional shutdown crashes
• Work for investigating and mitigating these crashes is being handled in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1271336
• [mconley] I'm working on making the initial <xul:browser> in <tabbrowser> remote by default if gMultiProcessBrowser is true (right now, we just do an immediate remoteness flip)x
• WIP patch appears to be having a fantastic impact on a number of our Talos benchmarks for at least OS X and Win 8: https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perf.html#/e10s?repo=try&revision=7c570b0090ec
• This comparison is showing improvements against non-e10s, not against pre-existing e10s. So we're going to be beating non-e10s on these benchmarks.
• Hoping to have this thing cleaned up and landed late this week or early the next.
• [mconley] Other notable patch is in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1269998 which will prompt users on pre-release channels to submit un-submitted crash reports for the past week or so.
• [felipe] experiment running at 50% sampling
• blocked from gtk 3.20 due to top crash
• hopefully will keep running during the entire cycle

Go Faster

Hello

• No Hello team present today.
• Working towards changes to sharing to focus more on async sharing.
• 1.3.x release going to beta users this week hopefully.

Privacy/Security

• Polish work in error pages, private browsing, audio permissions and downloads.
• Current focus is on permission management (Control Center v2) and captive portal detection.

Quality of Experience

• Refinements to "Recently bookmarked" feature, will now ride the 49 train (bug 1250203, bug 1267939, bug 1248268)
• No more userTypedClear. New private tab and error pages no longer clears location bar during load (bug 1241085, bug 1267289)
• Firefox Refresh
• No longer restricted to the selected/default profile (bug 1265368)
• Now advertised to users who uninstall the reinstall Firefox (bug 1095739)
• Reader view can now alter margin widths (bug 1151200) and line heights (bug 1269521)
• Curly quotes (and apostrophes) everywhere. Patches introducing straight quotes will fail an automated test if introduced (bug 1268159)
• Findbar improvements, including whole word search (bug 269442), highlighting (384458) and hi-dpi icons (bug 896304)
• Reader view now remembers where you have scrolled too (in both session restore & bfcache) (bug 1153393 & bug 1269996)

Search

• Many awesomebar/places performance improvements (bugs 1262887, 907001).
• Fixes for followups of the awesomebar results UI refresh.