Firefox/Meeting/13-Mar-2018

General Topics / Roundtable

• [mconley] Seen a bugfix land that’ll likely impact Firefox performance in a positive way? Help me let the world know!
• [mconley] Want to add a ChromeOnly WebIDL binding? Good news! As of this bug and this bug, you don’t need DOM peer approval anymore! Ongoing discussion in dev-platform about the implications.
• [mconley] Help Ehsan eliminate annoying in-content popups by installing this add-on and reporting when pages display something like this.

Friends of the Firefox team

Introductions

•  :Prathiksha got her Level 3 contributor access last week!
• Mike Kaply joined the Firefox team

• Resolved bugs (excluding employees): https://mzl.la/2DlmYcH 

• More than one bug fixed:

•  :prathiksha
• Dhi Aurrahman
• Tim Nguyen :ntim
•  :jonathanGB

New contributors (🌟 = First Patch!) 

• 🌟 Adam Kasztenny got rid of a bunch of dead code from the old about:newtab page
• 🌟 Amy switched some tests from using a hand-rolled promiseTopicObserved to using TestUtils.topicObserved
• 🌟 Aleksandr got rid of some dead code in the browser/modules directory
• Arthur Deschamps made sure that we send the user to about:privatebrowsing in private browsing windows at the right times
• 🌟 Omar got rid of the unused gBrowser.tabContextMenu property
• 🌟 Raymond converted some hardcoded colours in about:addons to CSS variables instead
• Daniel Marshall (:starsandspirals) renamed the “profileStorage” Form Auto-fill singleton to “formAutofillStorage” to make its purpose more clear
• 🌟 gregorywlodarek changed the label for a button in about:preferences so that it makes more sense
• 🌟 kanika16047 switched a test from using a hand-rolled promiseWaitForCondition to using TestUtils.waitForCondition instead
• 🌟 Michael Webster added support for showing download progress in the taskbar on Linux Mint
• 🌟 Olivier Tilloy updated how we detect and set Firefox as the default browser on Linux when installed as a Snap package
• 🌟 Videet Singhai removed the unused MEMORY_HEAP_COMMITTED_UNUSED Telemetry probe

Project Updates

Add-ons

• Including an embedded experiment in a WebExtension no longer breaks browserAction (uplifted to 59).
• Tab hiding shutdown now happens even if the API is unused, removing the possibility of hidden tabs staying erroneously hidden (fixed in 60).
• tabs.query() returns highlighted tabs when querying… highlighted tabs (fixed in 60).
• Dev tools panel drop downs expand as they should (fixed in 60).
• Async proxy.onRequest API (fixed in 60).
• ...and DNS resolve API added (also in 60).
• Improved information on where errors triggered by async APIs came from (in 60).
• Fixed an issue where extension sidebars reload unnecessarily (fixed in 60).
• (Never know if I should mention security bugs in here, but let’s just say that two of those have been fixed in 60.)
• Theming:

• You can now set the active tab line color (in 60).
• You can now change the background color of the selected tab (in 60).
• Narrowly avoided releasingtab_background_textmisnamed which would’ve been bad for migrations of Chrome extensions (uplifted to 59 -- thank you, ntim).

Activity Stream

• Landed section context menu to help users manage the sections, such as remove section, collapse section, and other section specific options
• Landed section reordering, which allows users to change the layout of AS.
• Various fixes for bookmarks (Bug1444518, Bug1442383) and snippets (Bug1438368)
• Dashboard for Activity Stream Metrics Summary, Search, and User Preferences
• Move AS settings to about:preferenceswill be landed in 61 other than 60

Browser Architecture

• Only 5 XUL overlays left!
• XUL menu replacement planning.
• Working out naming for custom elements in chrome.

Lint

• No updates this week

Policy Engine

• Administrative templates being created to set policies through Windows GPO
• See how it looks: (screenshot removed because I didn’t create it, I picked the one from ghacks just to show it in the meeting)
• Press picking it up
• Documentation on MDN
• Big marketing push for Firefox Quantum for ESR (aka Firefox 60) starting (probably) today, which will be talking about this feature

• Send feedback our way

• YUKI “Piro” (from Tree Style Tab) contributing

Performance

• Tab warming has (finally!) been enabled on Nightly

• See any issues with it? Please file bugs and mark them blocking this bug

• mconley is getting rid of some sync reflows
• dthayer is moving ContentPrefService database queries off of the main thread
• dthayer also landed some probes to help shed more light on where tab switch spinners are coming from (they’re likely from bugs in the async tab switcher!)
• Gijs got rid of some unneeded code from the old about:newtab page that was running during start-up
• Gijs is also making us way lazier at getting and parsing the blocklist, which should help reduce the amount of stuff we’re doing at start-up
• florian is working on making our performance tests more comprehensive and easier to write
• Reminder: Please queue Firefox front-endy bugs for triage with the [fxperf] whiteboard tag

Privacy/Security

• We are deprecating and removing the proprietary storage option for indexedDB.open() to get rid of the “indexedDB” permission mess.

• Intent: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.platform/3b700_oeAzo
• Compat Note: https://www.fxsitecompat.com/en-CA/docs/2018/storage-option-for-indexeddb-open-has-been-deprecated/

• We disabled the devicelight, deviceproximity and userproximity events.
• We’re starting a quest to rid Firefox code of innerHTML and as a priority unsafeSetInnerHTML.

• You can use .textContent = “” instead of innerHTML = “”

• Tim added permission prompts for Web Authentication direct attestation (in which websites are asking for the non-anonymized token certificate).
• Chris Kerschbaumer changed the way chrome and about pages can communicate.

Search and Navigation

Address Bar & Search

• New switch-to-tab behavior for the autofill match was confusing users, now we will instead provide both the autofill match and a switch-to-tab one. (will be uplifted to 60)
• Landed a telemetry probe to better understand how users cycle through address bar matches with the keyboard
• A last minute backout happened for Firefox 59. The original scope was to put search suggestions first for new Quantum profiles with a unified urlbar, but it ended up applying to any unified urlbar profile. We’re sorry about that and will do a post-mortem analysis of this mistake. A better fix is being worked on for Firefox 60. Note that there’s a Shield Study that could end up doing the same change, you can verify if you’re involved in about:studies.
• Drew Willcoxon (:adw) is the new triage owner of Firefox :: Search. Gratz!

Places

• Fixed some regressions:

• the bookmarks dialog didn’t save keywords anymore
• Misbehaving Drag&Drop in menu views
• open bookmarks in a new tab from the sidebar was broken

• It’s no more possible to create third-party roots in Places. We’ll shortly remove anything that is not part of one of the official roots (menu, toolbar, unsorted, tags, mobile)
• Updated the Favicons for the default bookmarks
• Controller.js is now a lazy loaded script, rather than being loaded on each window opening. Additionally Bdahl is removing placesOverlay.xul!
• Bookmark tags autocomplete should not assert/crash anymore in debug builds

More

• Our Sqlite implementation now uses unique temporary file names (prefixed with “mz_”), to avoid confusing our temporary files I/O with other running apps
• Thom landed a patch to reuse transaction timeout timers in Sqlite.jsm ⏰.
• Kit changed Places to use immediate transactions by default. This fixes a storage thread hang with a cloned Places connection in the new bookmarks mirror.

Sync / Firefox Accounts

1. Ed has a proposal for a way to detect copied and moved profiles 🚚.
2. Ed is working on a client for Pushbox, a new service to store and fetch push payloads for the new “Send Tab” 📦, and also submitted a fix tohide Sync prefs when disabled 🙈, fixed a frequently-failing test caused by spurious syncs ⛔️, landed a patch to write weakly uploaded records back to the bookmarks mirror 🏋️‍♀️, fixed event telemetry views for Android 📅, and radically simplified Sync error handling ⚠️.
3. Thom improved tree logging for the bookmarks mirror 🌲, improved deduping for automatically restored bookmarks ✨, fixed a login check and cascading cleanup failures in TPS 📝, added a test for duplicate synced passwords 🔑, and removed an old ‘n busted test 🏚.
4. Mark is working on adding Web Push encryption to Firefox 🔒, removed remaining event loop spinning from Sync 🌀, made the bookmarks mirror handle item type changes gracefully ♻️, fixed tag handling in the mirror 🏷, analyzed several mirror bugs 🐞, and filed a meta bug for Pushbox work!
5. Kit moved Sync metadata for bookmarks and history into Places 🗺, and fixed and optimized deduping in the mirror 📚. Working on a blog post for dogfooding!

Test Pilot

• Graduations set for 3/27 for Cliqz, Voice Fill, Snooze Tabs, Min Vid 
• Firefox Themer updates:

• has sweet new new textures
• Launch dates are still TBD
• Technical blog post from Les: https://medium.com/firefox-test-pilot/fun-with-themes-in-firefox-54a3180f16e4

• Screenshots updates:

• Annotations launched! You can now crop, highlight, or draw on uploaded screenshots.

• Blog post on the way (pending legal approval)
• Find it on the Test Pilot medium: https://medium.com/firefox-test-pilot

• Upcoming: Firefox Accounts integration, porting the WebExtension to Chrome
• Blog post looking at our usage data: https://medium.com/@john.gruen/f0fbb5e9351f

Web Payments

• Only four remaining milestone 1 bugs!
• hsivonen is now working on DOM bugs!
• Fixed

• Don't dispatch shipping*change events if requestShipping is false 
• Implement the payerName/payerEmail/payerPhone contact picker 
• Success/failure screens

• Implement the "failure" screen for when the merchant rejects the payment and doesn't request retrying 
• Implement the "success" screen for when the merchant accepts the payment 

• Cleanup/chores

• Use keydown instead of keypress to trigger display of the debugging panel 
• Forgot to call `sendMessageToContent` helper in "paymentDialogWrapper.js" 
• Document the need to have e10s enabled for Web Payments 
• Add error option to the PaymentRequest debug panel 

• Next/In-Progress

• Success/failure screens

• Implement the "unknown"/timeout screen for when the merchant rejects the payment and doesn't request retrying 
• response.complete() does not make the completeStatus available to the payment UI service 

• Privacy/Security

• Require non-Cancel address-related user interaction on the payment sheet before firing shippingaddresschange 
• PaymentRequest.show() must only be triggered by user activation 

• Cleanup/chores

• Console logging for unprivileged payment dialog code 

• M2

• Basic Payment Request Shipping Address Add/Edit page 

This week I learned

• [mconley] about:devtools-toolbox?type=process

• It’s like the Browser Toolbox, but it’s in the parent process in a content area. Handy for theme tweaking!

• [MattN] Following-up on a previous This Week I Learned… colored mochitest output is now enabled by default (for `mach test` and `mach mochitest`)!