Firefox/Meeting/22-Oct-2019
Today’s meeting leader is: mikedeboer
Contents
- 1 General Topics / Roundtable
- 2 Friends of the Firefox team
- 3 Project Updates
- 3.1 Accessibility
- 3.2 Add-ons / Web Extensions
- 3.3 Applications
- 3.4 Firefox Accounts
- 3.5 Sync and Storage
- 3.6 Push
- 3.7 Browser Architecture
- 3.8 Developer Tools
- 3.9 Console
- 3.10 Network
- 3.11 Layout
- 3.12 Fission
- 3.13 Fission
- 3.14 Lint
- 3.15 New Tab Page
- 3.16 Password Manager
- 3.17 Performance
- 3.18 Performance Tools
- 3.19 Picture-in-Picture
- 3.20 Privacy/Security
- 3.21 Search and Navigation
- 3.22 User Journey
General Topics / Roundtable
- Happy release day! Firefox 70 goes out to users today, full of all sorts of goodies. Blog post. This also improves power usage on macOS! Blog post from Graphics.
- [mconley] Reminder to tag Firefox Desktop performance bugs with [fxperf] in the whiteboard. The front-end perf team triages these every week, and can help get them seen by the right people.
Friends of the Firefox team
Introductions/Shout-Outs
Resolved bugs (excluding employees)
Fixed more than one bug
- Dennis van der Schagt [:dennisschagt]
- Florens Verschelde :fvsch
- Itiel
- Logan Smyth [:loganfsmyth]
- Marco Vega
- Sorin Davidoi
New contributors (🌟 = first patch)
- 🌟 Alessandro [:aka84] made it so that our DevTools en-US strings use Title Case across the board
- 🌟 Marco Vega fixed an alignment issue in the pretty-printing progress indicator and made sure that pressing Esc closes the Style Editor autocomplete popup, both in our DevTools code
- 🌟 Mustafa made it so that the Timings column in the Network Monitor DevTool hides when opening up the sidebar (since the sidebar also has a Timings pane)
- 🌟 Mellina Yonashiro enabled ESLint so that it runs in devtools/client/storage/test
- Zhao Gang made it so that the Debugger is better at highlighting the current line of execution when viewing a prettified source file
Project Updates
Accessibility
- We now have a readability backplate for high-contrast mode allowing us to enable background images in HCM. (example image: readability backplate alt text: the top browser window shows the default view of some text over an image, the middle browser window shows the same content in light on dark high contrast mode, and the bottom browser window shows the new readability backplate in action.)
- Reader View availability is now announced to screen readers. Before, screen reader users had to guess if a page was available in reader view.
- Toolbar badging is now accessible to screen reader users.
- optgroups in select controls now read properly for screen reader users.
- A fix corrected the accessibility exposure for the menu element.
- A fix landed for form autofill results being read twice to screen reader users.
Add-ons / Web Extensions
Unfortunately (because of a collision between this meeting and our weekly standup meeting) no one from the WebExtensions team will be able to attend the Firefox Bi-Weekly meeting this week. Updates in written form listed below:
- Mark added in the addon options menu for the addons that can’t be uninstalled from about:addons a link to a SUMO page (which provides more information to the users that may want to manually remove the extension from their system)
| 234x196px |
|
Link to SUMO page providing information about how to remove the extension manually. (Link: https://bug1580962.bmoattachments.org/attachment.cgi?id=9093316) |
- Shane fixed a bug that was making Firefox to wrongly restore the old default values of the prefs controlled by the extensions (instead of the new default value expected on the current Firefox version)
- Luca fixed a downloads API regression that was preventing the extension from receiving the downloads.onCreated even for downloads with a referrer property, and uplifted the fix to Firefox 70.
- Rob fixed a small UI regression on the notification triggered by extensions
- Tomislav is tirelessly fixing and re-enabling WebExtensions and Addon Manager tests that were still skipped on Fission (Bugzilla issues: 1589885, 1589481, 1589266, 1589508, 1589110, 1588390, 1588338, 1587914, 1587971, 1587633, 1587221, 1578420)
- Second part of the changes needed to hand-off AMO abuse reports to Firefox integrated abuse report panel has been landed on Firefox 71 (locked behind a pref), and the AMO team is now starting to work on integrating the new API available.
- Paul fixed a regression that was preventing a user to install addons when Firefox is in the “maximized fullscreen” mode supported on MacOS (where the Firefox can be in fullscreen but still showing the Firefox UI)
- Support for inspecting extensions storage.local data from the DevTools storage panel is now enabled by default on all channels, Firefox 70 is going to be the first version to officially support it \o/. Thanks Bianca!
Applications
Firefox Accounts
Sync and Storage
Push
Browser Architecture
- Done removing XBL bindings! More details in the newsletter post
- XUL/XBL Replacement Newsletter #18
- Bug 1583314 - Disable MOZ_XBL in Firefox
Developer Tools
Console
- Console settings menu (Bug 1523868), see the next screenshot. Contributed by Armando
- Scratchpad is deprecated and will be removed/replaced by Editor mode in the Console panel. The only missing thing blocking the removal is adding load/save buttons in Browser Console Editor Toolbar (bug 1584259) See the next screenshot
- Jump to definition button (displayed next to functions) should now properly handle sourcemap (Bug 1433373), thanks to mattheww
Network
- Numerous improvements to the Network Monitor’s networking blocking feature. This feature is available in Nightly behind a pref (QA testing currently in progress) devtools.netmonitor.features.resourceBlocking
- The Waterfall column (aka Timeline) hides automatically when a side bar is opened (bug)
Layout
- Whitespace text nodes are now displayed with a "whitespace" badge in the markup view (bug). Thanks to thomas.jean.lynch for the patch! See the `whitespace` badges on the next screenshot.
Fission
- Most of the team is focusing on Fission and we are working towards our first milestone that should be finished in December. The focus is on the Browser Toolbox we call Omniscient.
- List of preferences related to the Fission work is available through a toolbar FIS button.
Fission
- Autocomplete and password manager now work in fission. Many related tests have been re-enabled. 🎉🎉🎉
- Abdoulaye has finished fullscreen video support. 🎉🎉🎉
- Talos tests now run to completion with Fission enabled
The following components are being ported to JSWindowActors by MSU capstone students:
PageStyle port is functioning with Fission enabled, just need to hammer out a final bug before landing
ShieldFrame port is being reviewed
PageThumbs is inching closer to completion, just one test failure remaining
UITour port is beginning
PopupBlocking port still in early phases, but the notification bar now appears
PictureInPicture works with JSWindowActors, but appears to be broken in oop-iframes. Currently investigating.
Lint
- No updates
New Tab Page
- Just some small UI and UX tweaks to finish off 71.
Password Manager
- Removed insecure password field detection code for the address bar.
- Fission: Thanks to Neil for landing a big series to make password manager work with Fission. We have also been working on test changes and fixing intermittent failures.
- eTLD+1/Subdomain login suggestions: Enabled to ride the trains for Fx71 after some fixes. Last optional fix was to make it more clear which logins are for the same domain.
- Desktop management: Now that we’re well into Fx71 development, we’ve done a number of tweaks to the about:logins user experience, along with a couple of enhancements like The "No Logins" screen should offer importing logins from another browser on supporting OS underway. If you still have the Lockwise desktop extension installed, please uninstall it since it’s now unsupported with the shipping of about:logins in Fx70.
- ‘Vulnerable’ passwords UX: Katie Caldwell has been working with the desktop UX team to support the next iteration of risk notifications for vulnerable passwords: https://mozilla.invisionapp.com/share/BEU7ZBJ486Y#/screens/386896727
Performance
- Here’s a recent comparison between base and Fission
Team has completed Talos and Mochi responsiveness tests audit. We've got a metabug for regressions / unrealistic improvements we've detected, as well as for tests that need updating
Next steps are to update the tests to be more relevant when Fission is enabled (make sure they exercise oop iframes), and to investigate some of the anomalies in our measurements
- mconley did some frame recording analysis, and it appears that Fission has no discernible impact on cold start time
- mconley also added an --enable-fission argument to ./mach talos-test to run Talos tests locally with Fission enabled
emalysz has work-in-progress patches up to:
Optimize sandbox policy construction, which should help improve content process launch times
Move more OS and CPU information gathering in nsSystemInfo off of the main thread, and into a lazy task instead
- Gijs has patches up for review to stop scanning for Flash synchronously at startup
- squib has a patch up for review to make about:home / about:newtab more efficient in how it queries for search information when doing the hand-off to the AwesomeBar
dthayer changed our StartupCache code to use lz4 compression instead. We expect this to improve startup times for users that haven’t just received an update (which is the common case on Beta and Release).
~5% median startup improvement on Nightly. Looking forward to analyzing impact on Beta and Release.
Performance Tools
- The checkbox to enable "No Periodic Sampling" mode has landed in mozilla-central today, will be available in the next Nightly. That will help users by capturing only markers and reducing the profiler overhead.
We are working on some cool stuff like:
Reducing the overhead of responsiveness data and visualizing event delay(example profile with deploy preview):
(New event delay tracks for each thread)
Squib is very close to landing IPC markers inside a new track(example profile with deploy preview):
519x142px
(An IPC marker inside the parent process IPC track)
Picture-in-Picture
- Plan continues to be to do a slow roll-out of Picture-in-Picture to our Windows users in Firefox 71 Release.
Fixed:
Bug 1585769 - Attempting to open some videos in the Picture-in-Picture player results in an all-white player window and SecurityError: The operation is insecure error
Bug 1568373 - Picture in Picture should have a black background
Bug 1587362 - PiP button doesn't work after putting tab back in window
Next:
Bug 1568316 - Picture-in-Picture window is missing the OS drop shadow
Bug 1589158 - Add in-tree documentation for Picture-in-Picture component
Begin working on macOS support, tentatively aiming to have that done for Firefox 72
Have QA begin testing macOS and Linux support for a potential Firefox 72 release
Privacy/Security
Firefox 70 is shipping today and contains a lot of great work by this team!
- Paul is working on isolating permissions by Origin Attributes
- Tracking protection milestones CFR banner landed. When the number of trackers firefox has blocked for you hits certain milestones (1k, 5k, etc), you’ll be notified with a banner and a little shield illustration in the protections panel.
Search:
Separate search engine for private browsing (Firefox 71)
Enabled by default in Nightly and early Beta (can be controlled through the temporary feature pref browser.search.separatePrivateDefault.ui.enabled).
When you report bugs, please make them block Bug 1411340.
It is now possible to enable Search suggestions also for private windows from about:preferences#search.
It is possible to directly run a search in a private window from a normal window (with the private search engine, if set) from the content contextual menu, the urlbar, the command line.
The feature discovery banner in about:privatebrowsing for now has been disabled (pending a future different design).
Search configuration modernization (Firefox 72)
No updates, team moving back to this project
Address Bar:
Regression fixes:
Visual redesign (aka “megabar”, Firefox 72)
Started implementing a new revision of the design, with the field not covering adjacent toolbar items.
Working closely with UX. Focus is on making easier to search and better separation of concerns.
Stability and smoothness fixes.
Search Interventions experiment (Firefox 72)
Accessibility and stability fixes.
Work on the experimental add-on starting.
User Journey
Feature complete for off-train message l10n for user messaging
It uses a remote up to date asrouter.ftl file from RS falling back to the local version to allow localized remotely deployed recommendations
- Display a toast for reaching tracking blocked milestones
Randomly pick one of 6 about:welcome variants for modal/less and messaging experiments
Previews in the technical doc
