Firefox/Meeting/26-Apr-2016

Actions from last meeting

• None

General Topics / Roundtable

(tips/tricks/FYI, productivity improvements, industry news)

• bug 1259889 - CSS can now check boolean prefs eg:
• @supports -moz-bool-pref("bacon.enabled") { background-image: url(bacon.jpg); }
• I'm assuming this is limited to 'chrome privileged' CSS? (which is a bit hairy in terms of definition, but anyway) ?
• This only works for UA stylesheets, not author ones: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1259889#c37
• [past] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/CSS_Tips
• PSA: Cancel your old Try pushes
• [Gijs - who can't make the meeting]: PSA: please please please stop adding new tests to browser/base/content/test/general/ unless there's really really really no other places to put them - there were over 300 tests in there (now ~270).
• If you have time (hah!) consider helping move tests out of there into topic-specific sibling directories: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1265052
• [mconley] How to use MozAfterPaint properly: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/mozilla.dev.platform/MozAfterPaint/mozilla.dev.platform/pCLwWdYc_GY/j9A-vWm3AgAJ

Friends of the Firefox team

(Give a shoutout/thanks to people for helping fix and test bugs. Introductions)

• Resolved bugs (excluding employees): http://mzl.la/1VPr97N
• More than one bug fixed:
• Katie Broida
• Katie and Rakhi, who was mentioned last meeting, are 2 of the folks who will be helping us out this summer as part of the Outreachy project. Katie is being mentored by Jared, Rakhi by Gijs. Please say hello and help them out when & where you can! :-)
• Rutuja Serve (:Rutuja)
• Rutuja fixed some bugs in about:memory for both Desktop and Fennec. Rutuja is being mentored by mconley for Outreachy.

Project Updates

Add-ons

E10s

• 47 beta experiments starting up https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/Experiments
• Here's the release criteria we're working with: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/Release_Criteria
• A bunch of stability work got landed in time for 47, so we're hoping to see some improvements in content process up-time
• The team is primarily focused on the last M9's, stability and performance work.

Go Faster

Hello

• e10s: major bugs now landed. Hello supports e10s for 47 & later.
• e10s: follow-up to last week's note about em:multiprocessCompatible/bug 1262560: It appears the leaks are now fixed on Firefox 48 (awaiting final try confirmation!) 
• add-on version 1.2 shipped today as part of 46 - UX flow improvements - ripple effects when clicking in screen sharing, 
• add-on version 1.3 shipping via go faster update channel in a few weeks to 46 users, with some more UX improvements, e.g. prompting to enter a room name on exiting the room.
• Product changes to focus more on async sharing (with sync options), in progress.

Privacy/Security

• New design for the about:privatebrowsing page.
• Bug 1259340 http://people.mozilla.org/~bbell/about-page-improvements/about-privateBrowsing.html
• New design for the Safe Browsing error page.
• New responsive design for net/cert/malware error pages improves the consistency between desktop and mobile, and allows mobile to reuse them.
• Improved error message for the case where TLS connections fail due to the clock in the user's system having gone off into the weeds (data shows this to be the #1 reason for HTTPS errors). Bug https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=712612 (thanks!, duped over a bug)��
• Malware detection improvements:
• Enabled blocking Potentially Unwanted Software and Uncommon Software categories (about an order of magnitude more blocks than what we had before).
• UI additions to allow a blocked download to proceed from primary UI with a few clicks.
• Added icon badges to the downloads button (or menu button when the downloads button is hidden there) when malware downloads are detected.
• Updated the about:preferences section that deals with the Safe Browsing service to provide users with more control over their experience.
• https://screenshots.mattn.ca/compare/?oldProject=mozilla-central&oldRev=ab8a76ac7b34db20dd3c220c9846826334f3efdc&newProject=mozilla-central&newRev=1c6385ae1fe7e37d8f23f958ce14582f07af729e&filter=prefsSecurity

Quality of Experience

• Decoder doctor work has landed and should get uplifted to 47 this week
• This will show a notification bar if users are missing platform decoders or DRM modules, with instructions for how to install them
• part of https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2016/04/08/mozilla-to-test-widevine-cdm-in-firefox-nightly/
• Keyboard support for customizing Firefox
• In the Customization view on Windows and Linux, use Tab to move from item to item, then open the context menu (either through the context-menu key or Shift+F10), and the menuitems have options for where the item can be moved to
• Katie Broida (:ktbee) has fixed a number of QX bugs:
• bug 1260595, items in the themes menu could get duplicated
• bug 1235320, remove the text-shadow from menu bar items without aero glass
• bug 1247214, context menus in about:preferences can have wonky fonts / sizes
• (in progress), bug 1093750, toolbar items in Customize Mode should have tooltips
• Exiting Reader Mode is now super fast, without requiring a reload of the page (bug 1184950)
• Thanks :timdream! \o/
• Panels in UI Tour now look much better (fixed padding and margins) (bug 1180186)
• Thanks :Unfocused!
• Onboarding work: still adding tests for addon migration, disabling "5 recent bookmarks" for Aurora again, hoping to have it ride 49.

Search

• Awesomebar UI refresh followup work.
• Telemetry experiment evaluation (https://github.com/mak77/telemetry_analysis/blob/master/unified-urlbar-analysis.ipynb ):
• the number of users that restored the search bar was about the same as the number of users who had already removed the search bar prior to the experiment
• the number of users who used search remained relatively stable
• there was a significant drop in search volume, which may indicate that some users were confused by the change
• we didn't collect data about the pages users visited, so one theory is that some resorted to visiting their preferred search engine manually in order to search
• putting one-off search buttons in the awesomebar made them more discoverable and more useful
• searching from the awesomebar makes the search suggestions more useful
• Next steps:
• we will not remove the search bar just yet, more experimentation is needed to determine if we should do this
• we will launch another simpler experiment in the future, with an improved onboarding experience
• the remaining add-on changes that improve the consistency between the search bar and the URL bar will land soon (one-off search buttons, telemetry, etc.)