Firefox/Meeting/02-Aug-2016

Actions from last meeting

• None

General Topics / Roundtable

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

• [MattN] Looking into options for form auto-fill (multiple fields at once). Currently in proposal/planning stages.
• [mhoye] Engineering onboarding sessions begin today. Join #engineering-onboarding to participate.
• [RyanVM] New Firefox QE data engineers

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/2arWY45
• More than one bug fixed:
• Geoff Lankow (:darktrojan)
• Rakhi(:rakhisharma)

Project Updates

Add-ons

E10s

• PSA - With e10s enabled, initial browser in new windows will soon be remote by default
• Shipping to 1% of our release channel target population, starting today! Looking for saturation by Friday.
• https://wiki.mozilla.org/E10s/Status/July22 (URL is erroneous, this is for July 29)

Firefox Core Engineering (+ team formerly known as "performance engineering")

• Reminder: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox_Core_Engineering
• Symbolapi.m.o is being rewritten (temporarily? unless it's performant enough). (Rewrite will include the current ability to use local symbol files.)
• Client-side stackwalking:
• pushed out slightly -- moving minidump analyzer to its own executable, launched by the crashreporter.
• we are using the crash ping as the transmission vehicle. Post-submission data analysis determination is the next focus.
• still aiming for FF50 uplift (Nightly/Aurora only, regardless of version).
• Plugin/Flash blocking:
• still in definition phase (determining heuristics, UI, messaging, etc)
• setting up TestPilot approach
• Telemetry work (I can add more on that if people want more -- it's about dashboards, data, and aggregation changes; dunno how much interests/affects platform)

Go Faster

Hello

• Activities winding down
• Passing on system add-ons & process knowledge to other areas.
• Most of the team working on activity stream at least in the short term.
• https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/activity-stream
• mixedpuppy is cleaning up Social API

Platform UI and other Platform Audibles

• [Tim Chien (no audio/video)] Date/time input in-flight; Front-end UI panel WIP (HTML-based) to be posted this week for feedback (who should review this?)
• bug 1283381 - still empty, should have something tomorrow
• mconley and jaws are going to be mentoring a project to update and upgrade the styling and interactions around <select> dropdowns
• Bug 1091592 - Implement improved style for <select> dropdowns
• PWA on Fennec work by daleharvey is proceeding apace - concentrating on theme-ing the toolbar based on the web manifest
• Bug 1189618 - Update the style of the password manager autocomplete popup
• Going to replace the XUL tree-based autocomplete popup with a richlistbox one instead to get the styling
• In the process of refactoring and deduplicating the e10s and non-e10s Autocomplete mechanisms

Privacy/Security

• [MattN] Captive portal code has been put behind a Nightly-only pref as there are some MVP issues to finish and Nihanth has been on vacation after his internship ended.
• [MattN] Finalizing short-term password manager priorities to prepare for more contributors
• [MattN] New "Password Manager: Site Compatibility" component for pwmgr issues specific to certain sites
• In the control center panel, the permission dropdowns have been replaced with 'X' buttons (bug 1203292)

Quality of Experience

• New work starting soon:
• Dao working on long-awaited fixes to theme bugs in Windows high-contrast mode (A11Y, bug 1016556)
• Mike and Jared will be creating a plan for replacing XUL themes
• [Tim Chien (no audio/video)] Ray Lin is working on video control visual fresh and de-XUL, in-flight
• [Tim Chien (no audio/video)] Fischer Liu has swept in-content pref bugs and picking on low-hanging fruits.
• Mike de Boer is continuing work on the new dimmed and highlighted find toolbar
• Follow along in the meta-bug https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1291278 for when it gets enabled again
• jaws is working on un-janking our panel animations
• zoom controls in location bar are getting real close to complete
• HiDPI images for Windows 10 start tiles is in review now
• (Gijs on PTO, still working on automigration)
• Dao working on updates to last-used-order CTRL-Tab tab switching
• Now discoverable in about:preferences
• The awesomeness of this feature made me all teary-eyed.
• woooooow

Search

• One off buttons in the awesomebar panel ready to land, will be behind a Nighly-only pref to give us time to handle feedback
• Short-term fix for hi-res favicons ready to land. Long-term fix still being worked on.

Sync/FxA

This week I learned

• [mconley] Blob URLs can now be shared between processes and work properly
• So if you need to pass images or files between processes, don't serialize to a Data URL. Use a Blob URL.
• (if they're not shared over the message manager, how's the data get across processes?)
• Details are in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1279186
• [mconley] I'm guessing there's some shmem magic going on, but I honestly haven't looked.