Firefox/Meeting/13-Aug-2019

Today’s meeting leader is: mconley

General Topics / Roundtable

• [mconley] We need more meeting masters, folks! Please add your name to the list at the bottom of this document.
• [MattN] The Skyline feature complete deadline was Friday. If there is significant work remaining, make sure QA and L10N are in the loop.

Friends of the Firefox team

Fixed more than one bug

• Arun Kumar Mohan
• Heng Yeow (:tanhengyeow)
• Itiel
• Oriol Brufau [:Oriol]

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

• (To be populated after the meeting)

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

Somebody will be present to read this out loud if you’re lucky, otherwise enjoy a short list of some highlights:

• Tomislav fixed cookies being unavailable in the downloads API as well as a swath of tests that were “fixed” by another patch. Please do not disable default functionality (e.g. via pref modifications to fix a test) without review from the extension team.
• The topSites API received some updates (1568617 and 1570492) and was moved out of toolkit into browser (due to the set of browser dependencies required, and the fact it didn’t work on mobile anyway). Thanks Drew.
• Ryan Alderete fixed a discrepancy between Chrome and Firefox for setting some WebRTC settings (which should fix uBlock “Prevent WebRTC leaking” option in Firefox).
• Rob Wu fixed the use of chrome/resource urls for search icons (which broke browser.search.get) in some distributions. He also fixed a theme issue and a tabs.create problem.
• Mandy Cheang landed a patch delaying our reading of extension settings on startup \o/
• Shane mostly stared at other people's code and moved a couple patches closer to landing. Because staring at other people’s code is such a high, and admittedly because of the first bullet, he’s also now watching all patches touching extension code.
• nobody@mozilla.org closed some old meta bugs :-)

Applications

• Firefox Accounts

• Sync and Storage

• Push

Browser Architecture

• Fluent can be now used on the startup path!

  • Please, help us migrate away from DTD/properties

Developer Tools

• Debugger integrated tighter with platform to improve how it gets sources for files

  • With HTML parser to fix a set of long-standing issues around breakpoints in inline scripts

  • Improved integration with BFCache to load the right sources after navigating

• Async step over is now done with JavaScript engine support, making it more reliable
• Sources are now correctly showing their blackboxed state in the sources tree, thanks to :chujunlu
• Console’s new multiline editor mode, which lets you iterate on longer scripts with ease, is now enabled by default on Nightly (screenshot)
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  Multiline editor mode in Console input for quickly switching between modes.
• In an effort to make Responsive Design Mode (RDM) work more reliably across web platform features, title tooltips got fixed to work as expected.
• First testable version of full-text Network search landed behind a pref (devtools.netmonitor.features.search) in, done by :lloanalas
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  New network search panel that breaks down detailed search results
• Disabled breakpoints are now correctly registered when DevTools opens
• Inline variable preview for Debugger landed in Nightly behind a pref (devtools.debugger.features.inline-preview), amazing work by :dhyey35.
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  Preview for both variables and accessed object properties while being paused
  

Fission

• New chart of frontend fission work to be done.
• Various issues found with Responsive Design Mode, such as 1569570 for select elements. Abdoulaye and MikeR worked on some fixes. More to come.
• Neil continued to work on password manager fillin. Has dependencies on autocomplete and BrowserTestUtils being ported to fission as well.
• Abdoulaye has the Audio/Video controls working with Fission.
• Fullscreen, Form validation, AudioPlayback and Findbar are on review.
• Dogfooding Fission? Found a bug? File it blocking this meta.

New Tab Page

• Doing what we can to ensure Discovery Stream in 69 goes without a hitch.
• Some back end tools to help with how we manage story delivery.
• Working on promo content for 70 (paid and non paid)
• Did some changes to re-scope for 70.

• Did some more performance recordings on newtab startup, and have some potential performance gains

  • Possible 200ms startup improvement by rendering below the fold html lazily: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VsvhJ3eLcRhpOYLb7AR9S58QIjD7jK3ZvpPOH5nOzoQ/edit

  • Possible 10-50ms startup improvement with lazy load some jsms
    https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Zg0c6eln0r7MIzVdVf293-3onhhlUFhRJ0UMp7Erc4E/edit

Password Manager

• Coming soon: Bug 1570372 - CFR: Offer Fx Sync when a password is saved

• Management UI
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  Screenshot of about:logins showing favicons, the FxA username and photo, sort by breached websites, breached login icons, and a banner on the selected login explaining that it was breached (link)

  • Enable breach alerts in about:logins for all releases

    • Add "Sort by: Breached Websites" option

  • Favicons on each LoginListItem and on the LoginItem

  • Security review and testing complete

  • Add 'sign in to sync' button and message at the top of about:logins

  • Master password prompt before copying/revealing passwords in about:logins

  • Improved filtering performance

  • No logins view in the HTML-based password manager

  • Many a11y and visual polish fixes

• Password Generation

  • Security review complete

  • Many save doorhanger improvements

  • Edits to generated password fields will now propagate to storage and other fields it is filled into.

  • Other polish/tweaks

  • Main remaining bug to land is to merge an old login and an auto-saved one in the save doorhanger

Performance

• (A bit of PTO these last few weeks, so less progress than usual, but dthayer is back from parental leave now!)

• aswan has a patch up to make Monitor a standard browser component rather than a System Add-on. This is part of a test to see how much our System Add-ons infrastructure impacts start times.

  • aswan is also looking to do the same thing with Firefox Screenshots

• mcheang made it so that we get the country code from nsISystemInfo lazily and off of the main thread
• mcheang made it so that Activity Stream code loads JSMs less eagerly
• mcheang moved reading some WebExtension settings JSON files further out of the start-up path

Performance Tools

• Added tracking for JS allocations. It's still experimental but you can enable it by checking "JS Allocations" in recording panel feature flags(Example profile: https://perfht.ml/301avXy)

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(Checkbox in the profiler recording popup panel https://i.imgur.com/s2rZBb2.png)

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(Check the “Javascript Allocations” instead of “Timing” here to see them https://i.imgur.com/uL708vt.png)

• Native allocations tracking is on the way!
• Added PIDs in track context menu. It's now easier to see and enable which process you want to open.

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(You can see the PIDs of each process in the context menu now https://i.imgur.com/1kumtWe.png)

Picture-in-Picture

• In Progress:

  • There’s a patch up to add a special context menu to the Picture-in-Picture toggle to make it easier to hide

  • Another patch to add a keyboard shortcut to open the first video of the focused window in Picture-in-Picture

  • A patch has been posted to revive the VIDEO_PLAY_TIME_MS probe to help us to determine if Picture-in-Picture causes users to view more video

• Upcoming:

  • Add a Picture-in-Picture toggle visibility preference to about:preferences

Policy Engine (read only)

• Started work on kiosk mode.

Search and Navigation

• Search

• Quantum Bar

User Journey

• Uplifts in progress for several FXA-KPI related features (Monitor Snippet, Moments Pages, Extended First Run Triplets)
• Shout out to our intern Emily who completed the new Monitor snippet template project and is continuing to work on accessibility improvements for message templates
• Investigated some awsy/startup performance regressions around first run and determined we need some new test cases for about:welcome / messaging at first run