Today’s meeting leader is: johannh

General Topics / Roundtable

• [mconley] Writing a new test (mochitest, xpcshell, reftest)? Consider using --verify to reduce the probability that it’ll fail intermittently! Details.
• [mconley] Want rr, but you’re on Windows? Take heart! WinDbg Preview comes with time travel debugging. Holy smokes!
• [mconley] Matthew Wein is a volunteer contributor looking for a mentor to add multiple tab selection to the browser.
• [MattN] A `tabs` array is now available in the Browser Content Toolbox to provide access to TabChildGlobals of remote tabs.

Friends of the Firefox team

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

• Resolved bugs (excluding employees): https://mzl.la/2y70Zrs
  • More than one bug fixed:
    •  :prathiksha
    • Ian Moody [:Kwan]
    • Tim Nguyen :ntim
    • Tom Schuster [:evilpie]
    • Wouter Verhelst:wouter
    • [:Towkir] Ahmed
  • New contributors (🌟 = First Patch!)
    • 🌟 David Krauser added some great tests for the “categorical” type of Telemetry histograms
    • sajattack cleaned up some unnecessary strings and code for the standalone mode for about:addons (which we don’t support anymore)
    • Maya Messinger fixed a bug where the Flexible Space palette item would disappear when adding it to a toolbar via the context menu! This fix has been uplifted to beta.
    • 🌟 apoorvasingh2811 made it easier for our WebExtension infrastructure to understand extensions from the Opera browser

Project Updates

Add-ons

• browsingData is now able to remove localStorage by domain.
• browser.theme.reset() now accepts a windowId parameter.
• We now ignore the manifest key minimum_opera_version when processing a WebExtension manifest.
• The privacy API can now be used to control the privacy.resistFingerprinting preference.
• Extensions can now configure Firefox security devices (PKCS#11 modules).
• Lots of performance fixes, bug fixes and code cleanup!

Activity Stream

• Update on Activity Stream on about:home for 57
  • Landed patch to restore existing about:home in Nightly, preffed off by default
  • Starting a Shield pref flip study in Nightly to compare Activity Stream to existing about:home
  • Requested uplift for patch to 57 Beta so that same study can be run there
• Started planning / landing for 58
  • Q4 OKRs
  • Doorhanger info panel and collapsible sections

Browser Architecture

• XBL design review happened last week, next step is to share the plans more widely.
• Experimenting with removing the XUL box model

Electrolysis (e10s)

• No updates this week.

Firefox Core Engineering

• New projects († are subject to approval):
  • Adding a dummy crash reporter (en route to CFI-based stackwalking)
  • Jumping in to help with Chrome migration
  • Going to be creating a policy engine & API to support policy management in enterprises (not just Active Directory)†
  • Possibly revamping how we update the DLL blocklist† in parallel with some early injection mitigation changes
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=227246

Form Autofill

• Working with the SHIELD team to do the gradual rollout of address autofill in 56
  • One bug fix needs deployment first
• Continuing work on credit card autofill for the US (not riding the trains yet)
• “Clear” autofill item in progress

Lint

• All enabled ESLint rules are now errors rather than warnings.
• Next targets:
  • Getting Hooks installed automatically
  • Upgrading to ESLint 4
  • Using Services.jsm instead of getService where possible

Photon

Performance

• Been doing a deep-dive investigation on this bug where a user reports slower page load times due to the 60fps tab throbber
  • We’ve now got hardware where we can reproduce the problem on. The clock speed is really low on these machines (even worse when in battery-saving mode), which seems to be the main contributing factor.
• Fixed a bug where logins / passwords weren’t being filled in via the context menu item - this was a regression from some perf work where the contextmenu sync IPC message was removed.
• Patches will land shortly that will allow us to kill hanging JS more quickly in content processes when we’re shutting down or when all windows have disappeared. This should eliminate a class of slow shutdowns.

Structure

• You can now drag windows from their empty space
• Polished various aspects of customize mode:
  • Made the overflow menu easier to understand
  • Dark and light themes are now always available in the theme picker
  • Make removing items via drag&drop easier
  • Make dragging non-removable items work better
  • Adding flexible spaces to the toolbar using the context menu no longer removes them from the customize mode palette
• Fixed major issues with the panel animations
  • Ongoing work in this area
• Fixed an edgecase with dragging tabs.
• Polish on the hamburger panel
  • Zoom indicator sizing
  • Width in the face of scrollbars
• Polish in the downloads views
  • Jumpiness on hover
  • Handling items that are (re)moved after download
  • Icons should be bigger

Animation

• Working on animating the sidebar appearing/disappearing
  • Might make fixing bug 1402458 easier

Visuals

• Special thanks to our volunteer :Towkir who updated even more icons to the Photon style (bookmarks toolbar dropzone, about:license) and fixed some color issues with icons he previously added!
• Dão removed -moz-appearance: -moz-win-glass; from Windows 10 windows, which fixed a bunch of issues and caused a few new bugs to surface.
• Johann made tab separators not disappear when hovering tabs.
• Johann added additional drag space to the right of windows.
• Dale updated the search bar icon to use the new Photon icon.
• Volunteer Matthieu "utybo" S. contributed a new Photon-inspired autoscroll icon which we added to the tree, replacing the old platform-specific PNGs.
• A few polish fixes for popup windows.
• And a lot of other bugfixes.

Onboarding

• No updates this week.

Preferences

• No updates this week.

Platform Audibles

• Retained display lists are going to land in Nightly 58 behind the layout.display.list.retain pref. When enabled, this should give us a boost to paint performance since we’ll be re-calculating only the display list entries that changed instead of the whole list! Relevant mailing list post.
• The DOM team is going to be even more aggressive about throttling back timers in background tabs.

Privacy/Security

• No updates this week.

Search and Navigation

• Fixed various regressions in the Address Bar:
  • text cropped at the wrong point
  • removing history entries using DEL/Shift+DEL
  • matches now are properly aligned in the popup. As a bonus the change removed a large number of potential reflows and some jank. 🎉🎉🎉
• Some more Async Places Transactions fixes, feature still planned for 58.
• investigated a large number of frequent intermittent failures
• Experiments:
  • Resolved a perf issue in the Follow-on Search System Add-on, slowing down opening tabs
  • A new Search Hijacking prevention experiment was launched last week. Results will be available for analysis in a couple of weeks.
  • Based on the results from the most recent unified urlbar experiments, we’ll soon land a new mixture of results for the Address Bar
• Contributions from outside of the team:
  •  :Mystor added a pref to allow switch-to-tab matches to move the tab to the currently focused window, instead of switching to the tab’s window.
  •  :Kaie: fixed a longstanding (6 years old) bug in how we initialize Sqlite, so that NSS and mozStorage can coexist in a saner way in Firefox.
  •  :Gijs fixed a security bug about pasting specially crafted javascript urls into the Address Bar
  •  :Mats fixed copying urls containing multiple spaces from the Address Bar

Sync / Firefox Accounts

• No updates this week.

Test Pilot

• Screenshots shipped with Firefox 56!
  • Screenshots has processed over 7.5 million shots in the past 30 days
• Pulse graduation report
• Results of first a/b test on send.firefox.com

Web Payments

• Had our first front-end team meeting
• Handing over UX from Juwei to jsavory and met to discuss some concerns with the previous design

This week I learned