Firefox/Meeting/08-Sep-2020
Today’s meeting leader is: harry
Contents
- 1 General Topics / Roundtable
- 2 Project Updates
- 2.1 Accessibility
- 2.2 Add-ons / Web Extensions
- 2.3 Applications
- 2.4 Firefox Accounts
- 2.5 Sync and Storage
- 2.6 Push
- 2.7 Developer Tools
- 2.8 Fission
- 2.9 Form Autofill
- 2.10 Installer & Updater
- 2.11 Lint
- 2.12 New Tab Page
- 2.13 NodeJS
- 2.14 Password Manager
- 2.15 PDFs & Printing
- 2.16 Performance
- 2.17 Performance Tools
- 2.18 Picture-in-Picture
- 2.19 Privacy/Security
- 2.20 Remote Protocol (Chrome DevTools Protocol subset)
- 2.21 Search and Navigation
- 2.22 User Journey
- 2.23 WebRTC UI
- 3 This week I learned
General Topics / Roundtable
Friends of the Firefox team
Introductions/Shout-Outs
- [mconley] Welcome to mtigley and daisuke!
Resolved bugs (excluding employees)
Fixed more than one bug
- manas
Project Updates
Accessibility
Add-ons / Web Extensions
Addon Manager & about:addons
- Shane landed a patch to make sure that Firefox will double-check the version compatibility for the installed langpacks and disable them if they are not strictly compatible with the currently running Firefox version (Bug 1646016), this was likely a major cause for some YSOD (yellow screen of death) issues that were originally triggered by an issue on the AMO side.
WebExtensions Framework
- Matt Woodrow fixed a webRequest API regression which was preventing pages multipart/x-mixed-replace content to finish loading when extensions using webRequest blocking listeners are installed (e.g. uBlock origin) (Fixed in Bug 1638422, originally regressed by Bug 1600211)
WebExtensions API
- As part of fission-related work on the extensions framework and APIs, Tomislav landed some changes needed to make the browser.tabs.captureTab API method to work with Fission iframes (Bug 1636508)
Applications
Firefox Accounts
Sync and Storage
- 98% of our sync storage nodes have been migrated over to the new Rust based sync storage service, aka “Durable Sync”.
- JR Conlin is working on implementing a sync quota; we’ll limit users to 2GB per sync collection (ie, bookmarks, tabs, history, etc) and plan to roll this out in late September.
Push
Developer Tools
Fission
- Fission Nightly experiment is tentatively targeted for Nightly 83
Form Autofill
Installer & Updater
- Mhowell and Nalexander are researching how to move forward with a Gecko based background update agent. Work will continue on this effort through the end of the year.
- Bytesized has a patch open to add telemetry to track windows verified app settings to help us better understand barriers to installation for Win10 users.
Lint
- Sonia has continued work on enabling rules that were previously disabled when *.xul files moved to *.xhtml, with toolkit and accessible landing in the last week.
New Tab Page
- No updates
NodeJS
Password Manager
- sfoster is nominated as submodule owner
- Bianca Danforth and Severin Rudie are nominated as peers
- Ensure formLike.rootElement correctly points to the nearest HTMLFormElement ancestor, if any, when a password field is inside a ShadowRoot
- The PP prompt is displayed multiple times after dismissing the prompt twice on a form (on page load and form submit) if there are previously saved logins
- Please create the new collection "password-recipes"
- Option to save logins does not keep state in private mode
PDFs & Printing
- Beta uplifts are complete as of Thursday
- QA has been looking over the feature and the old print UI on beta and haven’t found any blockers for backing out our latest uplifts
- Go/no-go decision to be made on Friday, Sept 11
Performance
dthayer is working on a patch to show a “skeleton” of the browser early during startup on Windows
- bigiri has the about:newtab DevTools working with his ASRouter refactor, and is fixing the remaining broken tests
- emalysz has a patch up to lazify the Page Action menu
- Gijs has been eliminating main thread IO when saving files, and is looking to eliminate more when saving pages, and when downloading background updates
- mconley has a series of patches up to make it easier for front-end code to add BHR annotations for important user interactions
Performance Tools
Picture-in-Picture
The toggle variation experiment is now live! We should hopefully have some data to help us make a selection on which toggle to proceed with soon.
media.videocontrols.picture-in-picture.video-toggle.mode
- Default = -1
- Mode 1 = 1
- Mode 2 = 2
media.videocontrols.picture-in-picture.video-toggle.position
- “right” = right side (default)
- “left” = left side
media.videocontrols.picture-in-picture.video-toggle.has-used (only affects Mode 2)
- true - the user has used Picture-in-Picture before in 80+
- false (default) - the user has not used Picture-in-Picture before in 80+
- MSU students are working on improving Picture-in-Picture! Here’s the metabug.
Privacy/Security
Remote Protocol (Chrome DevTools Protocol subset)
Search:
Cleanup the search service after modern configuration shipped - Bug 1619922
Legacy search configuration code has been removed - Bug 1619926, Bug 1642990
Work is ongoing to improve some of the architecture of the search service and should be complete in the 82 cycle.
Consolidation of search aliases and bookmark keywords - Bug 1650874
Internal search keywords are now shown in about:preferences#search - Bug 1658713
WIP - Initial implementation of user defined search engines - Bug 1106626
Address Bar:
Urlbar Update 2
Refreshed one-off buttons are enabled in Nightly, when reporting bugs please check open dependencies of the meta Bug 1644572
Polishing the feature for release in Firefox 82
Behavior change: Left/Right keys on one-off buttons move the caret rather than trapping the user in one-off buttons - Bug 1632318
Improvement: Some restriction characters (*, %, ^) are converted to search mode when a space is typed after them to restrict results - Bug 1658964
User Journey
- Added Homepage targeting for Homepage Remediation CFR
Various about:welcome updates with 80 release and v3 experiment launch
Removing trailhead experience now that multistage is the default
Keeping a no-onboarding experience for experiment baseline
WebRTC UI
- Camera and microphone global mutes have landed, but are being held to Nightly
mconley is working on adding Task Tray icons on Windows to indicate that devices are being shared
We have something similar on macOS already
This week I learned
- [mconley] We use Python to turn YAML into C++ for things like Events.yaml and Scalars.yaml.