Firefox/Meeting/13-Sep-2016

Actions from last meeting

• None

General Topics / Roundtable

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

• Delay for 49 release to Sept. 20th
• https://groups.google.com/d/topic/mozilla.dev.platform/UmtrqgbLs-I/discussion
• [jaws/mdeboer] What if you could reinvent Firefox theming?
• Survey: https://goo.gl/forms/qUqQ4cAJ3oJueD5c2
• Initial survey results: https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-themes/blob/master/notes/09-08-2016.md 
• [whimboo] Reorganization of "Firefox-UI" tests in mozilla-central
• Suggestion is to use "puppeteer" directories
• [mconley] FortNightly (aka These Weeks in Firefox)
• I've been snitching these meeting notes to Platform managers: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1u9YH3ULNRYg6G-fN-Udkvfkcvg0alJfzi_zIAfFNkL8/edit
• Can I post them to https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org ? +1+1
• [johannh] Why no This Week in Firefox Blog?
• [mconley] At least to me, seems like too many blogs. But I'm open to argument.
• [MattN] New meeting host?
• I'll do it [jaws]
• Can also do it [mconley]

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/2cTgGWb
• More than one bug fixed:
• Adam (adamgj.wong)

Project Updates

Add-ons

• Was tracking https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1299586 as a P1, turns out it was https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1279246
• e10s traiging of SDK and other bugs has got us down to a very small amount of bugs
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1294199 fix ready for 50
• Hybrid add-on landing in 51, allows WebExtensions APIs to run from bootstrapped or SDK add-ons

E10s

• Still creeping towards 100% of our eligible population on release`
• Crash rates continue to be within acceptable tolerances
• Bug 1300411 - user reports excessive load spinning when switching tabs with e10s in 48.0.2 release
• We've had no luck getting profiles from the users that are experiencing this, so we're a little mystified
• Landed some opt-out probes for spinner rates in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1301435 to get a sense of how many of our users see things like this
• e10s will be enabled in Firefox 49 for users that have add-ons within a whitelist (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1zE1TNV0z6gaYgugBAns3XXDexLDHAa2Dmj0EVQIg8tc/edit#gid=0) and (I think) WebExtensions
• a11y and touchscreen landed in 51, but shipping in 51 is at risk due to some bugs (particularly https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1297549)
• RTL support for e10s is on track for Firefox 50 on Windows and OS X - SV signed off.
• For Linux, support timeline is still TBD
• Currently testing enabling e10s for users on XP with hardware acceleration enabled (see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1296353)
• This landed in 51 and 50
• Will back this out if stability numbers start looking bad for this segment
• Shipping e10s with 2 content processes is tentatively targeted for Firefox 52.
• More details at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/Multiple_content_processes

Firefox Core Engineering

• Symbolication server has been (largely) rewritten, but not yet deployed. Still needs some QA, but we want to deploy it with Ops first. (It does not auto-deploy from master, in case you pull.)
• Felipe is devising a way for us to experiment the impact of changing Flash behavior (some allowed, some denied, some click-to-play based on heuristics).
• still almost landing client-side stackwalking. [sigh]
• still deliberating with Telemetry on trying to send crash pings sooner via their own executable.
• (ddurst should let Felipe update about 48 hotfixing)
• Investigating what may be the cause of orphaned installs/updates.

Form Autofill

• Wiki page at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Features/Form_Autofill
• Mailing list coming soon
• Implementing as a system add-on in mozilla-central
• Development kick-off next week

Go Faster

Platform UI and other Platform Audibles

• Bug 1287178 - Refactor unsubmitted crash report handling and allow users to always send backlogged crash reports
• The plan is to have this go up at least as far as Beta, starting in 51, since some sandboxing stuff is expected to go to Beta for 51, and that team wants crash data
• Thanks felipe and jaws for reviews
• First round of review feedback for Date / Time form entry patches is done
• See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1283384
• and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1288591
• Bug 1267495 - Add fallback for GMP downloads if AUS is down
• Who is a good reviewer for this? Mainly changes to GMPInstallManager.jsm. spohl doesn't have the cycles
• ksteuber for feedback rhelmer for review
• Interesting things that Platform will soon ship:
• The File and Directories API (https://wicg.github.io/entries-api/) is shipping in 50
• Blocking media playback until doc is visible (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1262053 ) shipping in 51
• requestIdleCallback is coming (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1198381)
• Spec: https://w3c.github.io/requestidlecallback/
• Exciting! \o/
• ::placeholder and ::placeholder-shown (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1069012) are going to be unprefixed in 51
• Symbol.toStringTag (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1114580) is shipping in 51 
• Spec: https://tc39.github.io/ecma262/#sec-well-known-symbols
• Object.prototype.toString.call({ [Symbol.toStringTag]: "Hi!" }) == "[object Hi!]"
• Ah, gotcha! It's a fun one. :-)

Privacy/Security

• Insecure password UI will move another step to reach beta.
• Various regression fixes from the device indicator sharing work.
• Close to having a demo build in elm for product/UX signoff.
• Some password manager work (popup window fixes, pref to disable autofill on HTTP).

Quality of Experience

• [jaws] New video controls UI should be landing soon
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1271765
• [jaws] Work continuing on improving the panel animation smoothness
• [jaws] Some graphics patches have now gotten r+ and should hopefully land soon
• See dependency tree of https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1296070
• [jaws] Need to debug some more of Paolo's panel rearchitecture patch to see if I can help provide enough data to the layout people to help us with the issue
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1009116
• [jaws] Need to see if I can locally reproduce the test failures that Neil Deakin is having with his XUL layout bug fix
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1293242
• [jaws] Student group has started working on updating the design of the <select> popup (bug 1091592)
• Spec: https://bug1091592.bmoattachments.org/attachment.cgi?id=8776005
• [gijs] Ongoing work on high contrast support on Windows as well as less common (esp. dark) themes on Linux
• [gijs] Hopefully doing an experiment on Fx50 beta (for 2-4 weeks) with automatically migrating user data from other browsers when they first install Firefox
• Safari does this in a cheeky way: automatically imports data, then asks to change your default browser.
• Edge has importers; Chrome does auto-migration (need to check the box, but then continuously imports in background)
• [mikedeboer] Findbar modal highlighting
• Re-enabled on Nightly
• Plenty of new bugs reported, which is 'awesome'
• Plenty of new patches and fixes in-flight
• Performance will produce a fine backlog again
• Massive amount of work done (refactor all the things!)
• [mikedeboer] Firefox theming coordination
• [bsmedberg] PDFium replacement for pdf.js nearing completion
• Can we follow metabug?
• [bsmedberg] Integrating browsercomps back into xul and not exporting XPCOM symbols, for stability

Search

• Fixed some regressions in the awesomebar's handling of the Enter key.
• Fixed some regressions from the one-off search buttons.
• The universal search test pilot add-on is now working again on Nightly. If you had tried it while it was broken, you may want to give it another try.
• Getting ready to launch a new (Shield) study to test unified search with the release population.

Sync/FxA

• Thom has been working on adding validators for different sync engines [bug 1286918, bug 1286923, bug 1267917].
• Another plug for https://github.com/mhammond/aboutsync: checks your bookmark tree for problems, compares with what's on the server, supports anonymized exports.
• Telemetry pings [bug 1267919] report local sync errors, too.
• Atomic uploads for desktop are in [bug 1253051].
• Sync currently allows partial reads and writes, meaning it's easy to corrupt your bookmarks tree. This fixes the partial write case, where a sync is interrupted during upload.
• Bookmark engine improvements!
• Bookmark corruption is the most visible problem, and also the most likely to happen in Sync.
• Improvements coming to filter out special bookmarks that shouldn't be on the server [bug 1274496], and better tracking for bookmarks that should [bug 1258127, bug 1299338].
• Please report all bugs in the "Firefox :: Sync" component.

This week I learned

• [MattN] The default comparator for Array.prototype.sort uses string Unicode code points, even on Numbers
• e.g. [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11].sort() => [1, 10, 11, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]
• eek!
• http://i.imgur.com/NiDZf.gif
• It's "stringly" typed! hahahah *cries*
• Ooh, sort() takes a function argument. [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11].sort(function(a,b){return a-b;}) [No, I really didn't know this until now]
• Right, but it has a default one if you don't specify one
• FootGunSort
• Time for RealSort.jsm?
• [1,10,100].sort(d3.ascending) is great
• [dmose] Profiling on Nightly has some gotchas:
• https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Benchmarking
• The star UI ("bookmark this page") has a timer that auto-closes the popover after some time.
• Hard to know when you're interacting with the popover. (If you stop and pause to think, move the mouse out of the panel, and so on).