Today’s meeting leader is: felipe

General Topics / Roundtable

• From masayuki: Please stop using keypress event for handling non-printable keys
• [jaws] Google Summer of Code:
  • Nihanth/Johann is mentoring the “Download Spam Protection for Firefox” project
  • Jared is mentoring the “Multi-tab select in Firefox”

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/2DHraEr

More than one bug fixed:

•  :prathiksha
• Alejandro Rodriguez Salamanca [:alejandro]
• Ian Moody [:Kwan] (UTC+0)
• Oriol Brufau [:Oriol]
• Tim Nguyen :ntim
• Vikas Prasad Mahato [:vikas_mahato]
• jbonnafo

New contributors (🌟 = First Patch!)

• 🌟 17039 made Sqlite.jsm’s getSchemaVersion() return an integer instead of a string
• 🌟 Nathan updated the WebPayments code to use the recommended ESLint rules for Mozilla projects
• Arjun Krishna Babu switched our Preferences tests to use BrowserTestUtils.waitForEvent instead of its own custom waitForEvent function
• 🌟 dylan.turner updated a string in our Form Autofill code
• 🌟 Vedant updated one of our graphical assets to be consistent with the new Photon tab style
• 🌟 samreadingthompsondevelopment added the trailing commas requirement ESLint rule for the Migration component
• 🌟 Ashish Daulatabad removed some ancient and unneeded Netscape 4-era code from nsOSHelperAppService.cpp!
• Swapnil P (:DarthSwap) restricted BROWSER_*_DEFAULT probes to the parent-process only
• Vinícius Costa replaced do_check_array_eq with Assert.deepEqual in the sync code
• 🌟 william.loughton removed another unneeded XBL binding (menu-vertical)! Another one bites the dust!
• 🌟 zacknoyes2 made it so that we set a “status” property on the Error raised when Sqlite.jsm’s openAsyncDatabase or asyncClone fails
• 🌟 pubkeypin made it so that Preferences would open if MOZ_DATA_REPORTING wasn’t included in the build

Project Updates

Add-ons

• The tabs API now supports a captureTab method which can be passed a tabId to capture the visible area of the specified tab.
• The pageAction and sidebarAction APIs were updated to be consistent with changes to the browserAction API which allow for nulls to be passed to unset a property.
• The browserAction, pageAction and sidebarAction APIs all now support querying whether they are currently enabled/shown/open, respectively.
• The devtools.network API now supports a getHAR method which returns a HAR log for the devtools window.
• The tabs API now supports a hide and a show method, to hide and show individual tabs. This is currently preffed off, awaiting UX changes.
• Special handling was added to support popups which will contain remote browsers.
• The tabs.saveAsPDF API was enhanced with a print progress listener and the addition of four more edge properties to the pageSettings object.
• The menus and contextMenus APIs have been enhanced to support onShown and onHidden events.
• A proxyConfig setting method has been added to the browserSettings API to allow an extension to control proxy prefs.

Activity Stream

Priorities for Fx60 (what we are currently working on):

• Prefs: migrating newtab sidebar preferences to about:preferences

• • Porting existing sections checkboxes from React to XUL
  • Adding new customizations: section rows, reorganize “Home” section

• Highlights: adding new data types starting with Pocketed items
• Message Center: generalizing messages and notifications

• • Start with Onboarding Tour and Snippets
  • Eventually for centralized notifications even for non-UI features

• Perceived Performance: developing process to produce weekly Activity Stream timing videos for analysing perf
• Drag and drop fixes landed improving the overall experience

• • https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sa0Xrk8xWdf4EBf_4dtO9bEx-3XzChfZ/view

Browser Architecture

• XUL flexbox emulation into CSS flexbox can be enabled with the layout.css.emulate-moz-box-with-flex pref. Next: get it running in automation to track performance compared with XUL flex (metabug)
• XUL overlay removal breakdown (metabug)
• There’s a new components.css UA sheet for migrating XBL <resource> sheets into (bug)

Firefox Core Engineering

• Policy engine has landed (behind a pref), as well as several policies:

• • Bug 1421707 - Blocking of selected about: pages
  • Bug 1428922 - Per-origin allow/block permissions for cookies, popups, flash and addons
  • Bug 1429120 - Show bookmarks and menu bar by default
  • Bug 1428141 - Don’t check for default browser on startup
• Several others being worked on, as well as GPO support
• Plenty of opportunities to help with our list of desired policies on MVP

• Crash pings have come to Fennec, courtesy of Gabriele Svelto

Form Autofill

• There are no dedicated engineers remaining on the project so progress is paused for now.

Lint

• Sylvestre is working on integrating codespell as a lint option.
  • Initially limited to tools/lint and python/mozlint

Performance

Tab warming:

• Fixed a perma-spinner bug with tab warming
• Currently documenting the async tab switch to increase bus factor
• One last bug to fix, and then I plan on enabling tab warming by default on Nightly
  • There are some Telemetry measurements to sort out too
• FormHistory database initialization and migration have been moved off of the main thread!
• Quantum Flow is still a thing! Have you been assigned a qf:p1? Please work on it, or hand it off to someone else who can.
• promiseLayoutFlushed may not resolve the Promise in some circumstances

Preferences

• There are no dedicated engineers remaining on the project so progress is paused for now.

Privacy/Security

• We ran a user study on how different privacy protections break (or fix) the web. Here’s the blog post.
• Luke made Firefox trim HTTP Referer headers in private browsing mode.
• The crypto team wrote a blog post about the new WebAuthn API.
• We now have more detailed telemetry on permission prompts. You can find out about the origin scheme of the triggering page, whether the prompt was triggered from a user input event and whether it came from a third-party iframe.

Search and Navigation

Address Bar & Search

• Fixed a bug where copying a search suggestion ended up pasting a url
• Work continues on the new Address Bar autofill algorithm, close to be reviewable

Places

• incremental_vacuum has been enabled for favicons.sqlite
• Removed the Move Bookmarks dialog from the Library
• Fixed a bug allowing to rename a bookmark tag to an empty string
• Removed the legacy synchronous places transactions.
• Removing synchronous transactions allowed us to start removing synchronous bookmarks APIs, the following have already been removed (more will follow): GetPageTitle, GetBookmarksForURI and GetMostRecentBookmarksForURI, GetItemType, ChangeBookmarkURI, GetBookmarkIdsForURI
• Hemant has replaced calls to isURIVisited and promiseIsURIVisited with the more appropriate PlacesUtils.history.hasVisits

More

• Contributed fixes to Sqlite.jsm:

• • zacknoyes2 added a status property to the OpenAsyncDatabase error that allows to check for corruption
  • 17039 made getSchemaVersion return an integer rather than a string

Sync / Firefox Accounts

• New and improved bookmark merging has landed! \o/

• • This is a significant under-the-hood change to how we apply synced bookmarks, and should fix long-standing issues with Sync scrambling bookmarks, smushing folders, and undoing changes.
  • Special thanks to :mak, :markh, :rnewman, and :tcsc for their reviews and guidance!
  • There’s an explainer doc with an overview.
  • We’ll begin dogfooding within the Sync team, and send out a post to firefox-dev@ once we’re ready to have more folks try. Bug 1433177 tracks enabling it by default.
  • If you’re feeling adventurous, you can back up your places.sqlite, flip the services.sync.engine.bookmarks.buffer pref, and restart Firefox.
• Edouard is almost done removing event loop spinning from Sync, which significantly cleans up the code and should make for cleaner perf profiles.
• Thom is improving bookmark deletion to avoid resurrecting deleted items. There’s a sync-dev@ thread with some discussion.
• Various performance improvements.

Test Pilot

• Tab Split and ThemesRFun experiment development is now underway.
• The Test Pilot team is learning about WebExtension API Experiments and Embedded Experiments for use implementing future Test Pilot experiments.
• Snooze Tabs is gearing up to graduate.
• MinVid is preparing to move into a Shield study.
• The Test Pilot website has new “Featured Experiment” UI which will be turned on in the next sprint.

Screenshots:

• • 50 million shots! (since late 56 cycle)
    • https://twitter.com/FxTestPilot/status/958044848556212224
  • Toolbar button vs Page Action menu: yes, we’re seeing less usage, but our usage has been remarkably steady:
  • 602x205px
  • screenshots is becoming a module. Ianb owner, 6a68 peer.
  • we've updated our dev process to land early in the cycle and avoid uplifts
  • Ian is participating in the github-bugzilla discussions, more to come

Web Payments

• Improved breakdown completed. Talking with stakeholders
• Line-item list view and toggle implemented
• Improving the shipping address picker
• Connecting the shipping address picker to the PaymentResponse
• Credit card picker is coming soon.

This week I learned

• [MattN] Add the following to your ~/.mozbuild/machrc file to fix colored output of mochitests until bug 1132044 is fixed:

[test]
format=mach

• • NB: I have since learned that this breaks `--verify` on test commands (bug 1432683)

• [MattN] SimpleTest.registerCleanupFunction doesn’t currently work in browser-chrome tests, use the bare `registerCleanupFunction` function instead.
• [kit] `Cu.now()` exists, if you need a high-res monotonic clock to measure performance.
• [felipe] Cu.readUTF8File(..)
  • Memorizes file access and reads it ahead on the next startup

• [gijs] Heads-up - Cu.import and XPCOMUtils.defineLazyModuleGetter are moving to ChromeUtils soon . This will land while updating existing callers, and with an eslint rule to prevent using the “old” method of getting modules.
• [gijs] likewise, Cu/Cr/Ci/Cc will soon exist on every global without adding heaps of boilerplate. Yay!