Firefox/Meeting/7-May-2019

Today’s meeting leader is: johannh

General Topics / Roundtable

[mconley] Wow, what a weekend! Everybody okay?
- Your safety and mental health matters. Seriously. If you received threatening messages during the armagaddon, you should reach out to safety@mozilla.com.
- If you worked over the weekend please take it easy this week.
  - Special thanks to all of the people who gave up their weekends to help get our users out of this jam!
[mconley] Another dot release is being developed to take care of some edge-cases that weren’t handled in the 66.0.4 update
- Users with certain AV software, and users with the Master Password enabled seem to be affected
- [jaws] merge day is being pushed to Wednesday
[mconley] Who is on point to make sure this meeting works in a new Zoom-enabled world?
- [Mossop] I’m just chatting with AVOPS about that, I can take it, just want to know when we’d want to make the switchover.
  - Next meeting is fine
[johannh] Outreachy interns for this summer have been announced: https://twitter.com/outreachy/status/1125430293123485696
- Mozilla is mentoring 8 students this round
- Thank you to everyone mentoring
[sfoster GSoC too! Best link I can find is this one
[jaws] Lightning Talks submissions for Whistler deadline is Friday

Friends of the Firefox team

Introductions/Shout-Outs

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

Fixed more than one bug

Chris Frey [:nautilus]
Florens Verschelde :fvsch
Kestrel
lloan:[lloanalas]
Mohd Umar Alam [:umaralam48]
Neha
Tim Nguyen :ntim

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

Chujun Lu fixed a bug where pressing the Enter key when putting a conditional breakpoint into the Debugger would incorrectly cause a linebreak
🌟 DILIP fixed a spelling mistake in one of our console warning messages
Chris Frey [:nautilus] converted the toolbar context menu strings to Fluent, and also fixed two other Fluent-related bugs
jaril fixed a glitch where sometimes the Debugger would break on an exception unexpectedly
Mariana Meireles got rid of some dead code in AboutRedirector
🌟 Ananth fixed up a styling glitch in the Web Console for console.assert strings
🌟 Myeongjun Go made it so that a better error message is emitted when WebExtensions attempt to insert a bookmark folder into the root folder
🌟 Thomas made it so that we truncate very long strings in the DevTools Inspector info bar rather than let them overflow past the end of the screen
🌟 Mohd Umar Alam [:umaralam48] made it so that the Synced Tabs toggle shows an option to “Hide” in the Synced Tabs list when the sidebar is open, and fixed a glitch where the History Sidebar toggle label was missing

Project Updates

Activity Stream

A new experience on about:welcome
- Meta bug https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1545802
- This will land in 67
- Design https://mozilla.invisionapp.com/share/ZFRRK6ZSQW9#/screens/360574173
- 234x161px
A new CFR message in the bookmarking panel
- Meta https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1541914
- 175x290px
A lot of improvements and fixes to the new Pocket New Tab specifically around network failure states

Add-ons / Web Extensions

Rob Wu added browser console warnings in 68 for proxy APIs that will be deprecated in 71.
Mark Striemer has finished nearly everything remaining for HTML about:addons MVP for 68.
Shane Caraveo added cookieStoreId to webRequest APIs and exposed the private browsing flag in proxy/webRequest details.
Luca Greco added the ability to submit an abuse report on an installed extension from about:addons.
Kris Maglione fixed the theme header background image caching issue for converted LWTs (since they’re all static themes now).
...and everyone is reviewing like crazy to get things in 68 as planned because this weekend was a relaxing downtime before soft code freeze.

Applications

Screenshots

Lockwise

Rebranding going on this week.
The team is working on polishing the extension for an initial release and then integrating the extension into desktop Firefox.

Firefox Accounts

Janice is putting together a structure for the FxA and App Services documentation hub 📕
Ed and Vlad are finalizing the sign-in UX for Fenix, our next-generation Android browser 🚦
Ed landed Rust APIs for FxA device registration and New Send Tab. Grisha is working on integrating this into Android Components so that Fenix can use it 📑

Sync and Storage

Last month, we had a program review of the Rust sync and storage components. Check it out if you’re curious what we’ve been up to, where we are today, and where we’re going! 👓
Mark has an RFC for a sync manager in Rust, to orchestrate syncing of multiple data types 🔄
Thom landed code to import Firefox for iOS bookmarks into the Rust bookmarks component. The next iOS release will use the bookmarks component, and offer bookmark editing! 🔖
Ed is continuing to migrate our crypto backend to NSS 🔒
Lina has been working on adding telemetry for Android and iOS 🔍, and enabled the new bookmark sync by default in Nightly and Beta 📚

Push

Push for internal Mozilla consumers (New Send Tab, FxA verification) is coming to Fenix! 📣

Browser Architecture

RKV conversions have been rolled back for now while we investigate issues migrating from 32-bit to 64-bit builds.
browser.html conversion ready to go but waiting until the next cycle.
- May mean issues uplifting patches in rare cases.
Fluent cache for chrome documents ready to land.
- Currently means changes made by DOM mutations do not necessarily trigger fluent updates.

Developer Tools

(I’ll remove embedded images after the meeting and keep only links)

Console

Bug 1517728 - Export console output to file (Jefry Lagrange)
Console & Network Monitor: Copy as Fetch + Use in console (Bug 1540054)
Bug 1093953 - Console CSS errors should give a selector where the error is happening
- When CSS warnings are displayed in the console, you can now expand them (like a console group) to reveal all the DOM nodes that this warning applies to. So it allows you to jump from a CSS warning in the console directly to the inspector. screenshot link

Debugger

Work on DOM & Event breakpoints started
Progress with captured stacks for various errors appearing in the Console panel (for web developers) or Browser Console window (for browser + addon developers).

Network

Local HTTP requests are marked as secure now (bug). screenshot link

Remote Debugging

DevTools shortcuts now supported in about:devtools-toolbox (bug)

Favicons and user friendly titles for about:debugging and about:devtools-toolbox (bug) screenshot link

Closable error messages (and UI cleanup) (bug) screenshot link

Documentation

New MDN page for Logpoints
Set a breakpoint page updated to show column breakpoints

Performance

New startup main-thread IO test will be enabled on non-debug Desktop builds soon!
Patch to not load userContent.css in the parent process landed and bounced. After some discussion, we’ve decided to put loading userChrome.css and userContent.css behind a default-off pref
- This should allow us to avoid searching the disk for those files on start-up for users that don’t have those customizations, which will improve start-up performance.
aswan did some detective work and found some nice places where we can improve start-up time in the AddonManager for brand new profiles
dthayer is investigating compressing various things with lz4 rather than deflate
Gijs has a patch underway to avoid reading chrome.manifest files when not necessary
Gijs made file renaming / moving cheaper on Windows in the common case

Performance tools

Welcoming Raj Meghpara, our new GSoC student! He's going to work on Instruments import support for Firefox Profiler.
Network tooltips are now displayed as soon as the line is hovered.
The publishing flow has been streamlined (ux issue)

602x425px

New look of publish panel in Firefox Profiler with inverted checkboxes

More tools in the web console:

602x148px

List of available profiler information in the console

MOZ_PROFILER_HELP env variable gives help to profile Firefox startup.

Picture-in-Picture

Holding to Nightly while we iterate.
Please keep filing bugs against this meta bug if you notice anything strange. Thanks!
Fixed
- Clicking on the Picture-in-Picture toggle no longer sends mouse events to content
- The toggle no longer appears when in fullscreen
- The controls (mostly) disappear after 3 seconds on the player window when not hovering
- Fixed strange borders showing up when switching focus between the player window and other windows
- Made the player window easier to resize
Soon to be fixed
- Player buttons look strange on “tall” videos
- RTL support
- Keyboard accessibility
- And loads of polish!

Policy Engine

Privacy/Security

We had a work week in Mountain View to get things rolling for the Firefox 70 release / “Project Trailhead”.
- More details coming soon
To combat malicious malware sites, Paul made us disallow add-on installation prompts in full-screen.
Because it went so well, we are going to extend our experiment for requiring user interaction for Notification permission prompts to Beta.
- Another blog post coming soon
- We also landed the telemetry pieces to do the announced release measurements on permission prompt usage in 67 release. This will hopefully allow us to narrow down on a set of good heuristics for automatically blocking.
Prathiksha landed the first piece of her internship project to simplify and robust-ify the way about:certerror communicates with the parent process.
Jonas continues to remove all the eval() usage in our chrome-privileged code.
Small improvements to DNS over HTTPS UI in settings/preferences let you pick from resolvers

Search and Navigation

Search:

Looking into consequences and prevention after the add-ons certificate problem: Search Service initialization should be more robust
New Baidu search code deployed as system add-on

Quantum Bar:

Fixed 19 Bugs in the last 2 weeks

Quantum Bar is enabled by default in Firefox 68 🎉🎉🎉
Still working on a few remaining bugs
Designing and discussing WebExtension APIs for the first experiment

User Experience

This week I learned

[johannh] All container data gets deleted if you switch the containers pref