Firefox/Meeting/14-Aug-2018

Today’s meeting leader is: johannh

General Topics / Roundtable

• [dmose] please install NodeJS using mach; it will be required by default on Thurs, Aug 17th
• [mconley] You can get at nsIDOMWindowUtils directly in privileged scopes now via window.windowUtils
• [mconley] The way that we communicate with the content processes is changing - we’re starting to shift away from frame scripts towards an “IPC Actor” model. This is likely to land soonish.
• [mconley] Reminder: Services.ppmm.sharedData is a great, light-weight way for the parent to share information with content processes (both existing processes, and future processes)
• [jaws] ntim is finishing up his internship and will have his internship presentation next week on Tuesday August 21st from 2:15-2:30 PM Mountain View Time.
• [jaws] Abdoulaye is finishing up his GSOC internship and will have a blog post up on the Hacks blog hopefully this week detailing his work on multi-select tabs.
• [jaws] New Capstone project will be starting soon, migrating our UI from DTD/properties to Fluent. Project will run from first week of September to mid-December. Jared and Gijs will be mentoring, with help from Zibi and mconley.
• [bgrins] For JS running in browser.xul, please use children/firstElementChild/lastElementChild instead of childNodes/firstChild/lastChild if you expect to receive elements back (firefox-dev post)

= Friends of the Firefox team

• [johann] Today is the last day for Outreachy interns and GSoC students. Thank you for all your contributions! 🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

• Fixed more than one bug

  • Abdoulaye O. LY

  • Jorg K (GMT+2)

  • Thi Huynh

• New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

  • 🌟 Corentin Noël improved how Firefox integrates with the GNOME notification system

  • Siddhant got rid of the deprecated callback API to getShortcutOrURIAndPostData

  • 🌟 Sahil Bhosale refactored some PanelMultiView code to use a simpler way of getting element bounds without flushing

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

• Some issues with browser_style and checkboxes were fixed.
• WebExtension keyboard shortcut handlers and menu onclick handlers can now call other methods that require user input.
• The tabs.onHighlighted event now handles multi-select tabs
• Inadvertent restrictions on extension managed proxies have been removed.
• A few issues with the new storage backend were fixed, and it was enabled on Nightly!

Activity Stream

• Search Topsites [bug meta] are a way to emphasize searching from the location bar to the user.

  • There is a list of whitelisted search providers that we will convert to special topsites, clicking them will pre-fill the address bar with the keyword and users can do a direct search with that provider

Fluent

• Fluent now manages directionality of documents
• Fluent has been updated to 0.6
• Fluent 0.7 is in the second RFC Phase
• Get ready for an increased rate of migration from September

Lint (read only)

• ESLint has now been upgraded to 5.3.0
• ESLint has been enabled for dom/presentation

Performance

• felipe

  • Finished Bug 1369466 - RemotePageManager lazy-fication work!

    • 3.5% cpstartup win, 1% memory (Base Content JS)

  • Landed Bug 1470324 Don’t load EnterprisePolicies in the content process until a policy is checked

• florian

  • Improved tab reordering performance by avoiding lots of style flushes when moving tabs with the keyboard!

• Gijs

  • Landed a patch to avoid loading WebContentConverter.js too early during startup!

  • Got rid of a place where we synchronously flush layout in the AwesomeBar dropdown

    • We expect, however, that this mostly moves the cost of the flushes to the horizontal overflow flushes.

  • Continuing work on removing about:blank loads for new windows etc.

• mconley

  • Tab warming has been enabled by default on macOS, and is scheduled to ride the trains in Firefox 63

    • This already rode out to Linux and Windows in Firefox 61

Policy Engine

• Policy uplifts to ESR 60.2 have finished and are now being verified by QA

• Kanika Saini’s Outreachy internship last day is today

  • She worked on 19 bugs, from policy improvements, new policies and a brand now about:policies page which will land today in Nightly!

  • Big thanks to Kanika for her work on these past 3 months! 🎉🎉🎉

Privacy/Security

• Thank you to :Trisha Gupta for her great work on revamping the user experience on certificate error pages (including a brand new page just for system clock skew). You can try out the new error pages in Nightly and read more about her work in her post to firefox-dev.
• After doing a Shield study we’re landing Firefox Monitor as a system add-on in m-c. You can find the Firefox Monitor metabug here.

• The Tracking Protection UI has been replaced with our new “Content Blocking” (almost) everywhere. (Metabug) Check it out:

  • This is surfacing a new blocking technique called FastBlock, which blocks slow loading scripts from the tracking protection list. Blog post upcoming!

Search and Navigation

Address Bar & Search

• Matt Brubeck fixed a regression where ‘http://x’ would incorrectly load a search bookmark with keyword ‘x’
• Thi Huynh replaced this.DOMWindowUtils with window.windowUtils in urlbarBindings.xml
• Fixed a regression where rtl based text could overlay itself in the urlbar

Places

• Lina added a maintenance task to clean up duplicate URLs.

• Annotations Feature Removal:

  • Removed nsIDownloadHistory (replaced by an option to PlacesUtils.history.update to add annotations).

  • PlacesUtils.setCharsetForURI has been replaced and a new function implemented which also avoids main thread sync io.

  • Removed more page annotation related functions from nsIAnnotationService

  • Removed nsIAnnotationObserver as it is no longer necessary

• Removed PlacesUtils.mobileFolderId (all PlacesUtils.*FolderIds will likely be removed eventually).

Other

• Dan Banner updated the favicons for the default bookmarks in Nightly
• QuantumBar meta bug

Test Pilot

• Advance experiment launched!

  • Check out the blog post

• ICYMI: Lockbox desktop prototype show-and-tell was last week

  • The lockbox-dev list posting has links to the video, slides, and more

• Screenshots

  • Bootstrap removal work is a Q3 goal (1422437)

• Send Intern Emily Hou is done with her internship. She did a fabulous job working on the Send 2.0 update.

Web Payments

• Completed

  • Added branding to the dialog, generic and merchant-supplied error messages, and simple validation.

  • Checkbox for "Save credit card to Firefox" should be unchecked by default

  • Improvements to the required field asterisks

• In Progress

  • Adding a card network dropdown

  • Working on nicer add/edit forms and improved error handling

  • DOM fixes thanks to Eden who has been re-hired!

This week I learned

• [mconley] Florian discovered that accessing a hidden DOM node from JS in a XUL window is very expensive because it forces layout to do expensive style computations to check if an XBL binding needs to be attached synchronously. Example of bugs.

  • This might also be true for CustomElements. :/