Today’s meeting leader is: RyanVM

General Topics / Roundtable

• [mconley] I hacked together a WebExtension that puts your review count in a badge in your toolbar
  • Usage instructions
  • It talks to both Phabricator and Bugzilla independently
  • It’s still pretty rough. Issues and patches welcome!
• [aswan] Reminder that bootstrapped extensions are slated to be removed during the 65 cycle, we aim to have all in-tree bootstrapped extensions gone by the end of 64 (see bug 1449052)

Friends of the Firefox team

Introductions

• None this week.

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

Activity Stream

• Pocket team is working on a new version of the personalization engine
  • Overview doc https://docs.google.com/document/d/12OtUZywivIvBnO3hmMNjptmIQ8cQLFOIOzJO4bRLqdg/edit#heading=h.kcc1k3q7kts8
  • Some work landed https://github.com/mozilla/activity-stream/pull/4294
• Working on getting the Contextual Feature Recommender and the new version of Snippets based on Activity Stream Router ready for experiments

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.

Application Services (Sync / Firefox Accounts / Push)

• No updates this week.

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
• Landed in 63:
  • Accessibility panel is now enabled by default
  • better error messages in console
  •  :rcaliman landed Font Editor landed in DevEdition
  •  :ladybenko & :jdescottes finished planned work to support for webcomponents (examples)

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.

Performance

• Greg Tatum
  • Screenshots and Network information now deployed in the Timeline - Profile example
    • 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.
  • Importing other formats (experimental previews)
    • Linux's perf:
      • Drop a profile here
    • Chrome profiles:
      • Drop a profile here
      • Converted profile example
• 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.
• 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
• 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!
    • Here’s a GIF. 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.
    • Made it so that the initial browser in a window is inserted dynamically
    • Simplified some of our testing code as part of it
• 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.

Policy Engine

• No updates this week.

Privacy/Security

• 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
• 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

This week I learned

• [mkaply] You can set MOZ_BUILD_DATE in the environment to override the build ID if you want to build something that matches a released build. This is handy because various databases reset based on build ID, so you move profiles from a released build to a debug build
• [mkaply] If you need to know if Firefox is shutting down, use Services.startup.shuttingDown