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
- More than one bug fixed:
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
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:
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
- Fixed an edgecase with dragging tabs.
- Polish on the hamburger panel
- Polish in the downloads views
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.
- 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