Firefox/Meeting/25-Aug-2020

Today’s meeting leader is: MattN

General Topics / Roundtable

• [mconley] Please don’t forget to tag your performance bugs with [fxperf] in the whiteboard. Your friendly Front-end Performance Team triages these and makes sure the critical ones get escalated.

  • We also make sure that the platform-y bugs get put into the platform team’s triage queue, so if you’re not sure, just use [fxperf].

Friends of the Firefox team

Introductions/Shout-Outs

• [MattN]

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

Fixed more than one bug

• Kriyszig
• manas

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

• 🌟 aichi.p.chang fixed an issue with how we were passing parameters to observers in our region-detecting code.
• 🌟 codywelsh improved the grid layout in DevTools fission preferences.
• Duncangleeddean upgraded eslint-plugin-jest.
• Luc4leone added an option to the debugger editor context menu for the user to be able to wrap / unwrap long lines.
• Nikhilkumar.c16 swapped the collapse and block icons for blocked network messages in the DevTools Console.

Project Updates

Accessibility

Add-ons / Web Extensions

WebExtensions Framework

• Fixed a regression related to the extensions messaging API (regressed in Bug 1649477 and fixed in Bug 1655624, and a new regression tests added in Bug 1659074)

WebExtension APIs

• Fixed a regression on the downloads.download API, which was excluding non-first party cookies in the requests triggered by the downloads.download API if the extensions do not have explicit host permissions (regressed in Bug 1437626 and fixed in Bug 1655190)
• Thanks to Tim Giles Firefox will now be showing in about:preferences if an extension is controlling the password saving pref by using the privacy.services.passwordSavingEnabled API (Bug 1620753)

Applications

Firefox Accounts

Sync and Storage

Push

Developer Tools

• Feature development paused

• Top priorities:

  • DevTools compatibility with Fission

  • Marionette compatibility with Fission

Fission

• A slightly re-organized about:processes is coming:

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Form Autofill

• A/B Testing in Fx80

Installer & Updater

• Bug 1647422 - Profile Counter Telemetry

  • Although there is an existing profile count metric, this new metric counts across OS users and across reinstallations.

  • Implemented as a scalar: browser.engagement.profile_count

• Bug 1647443 - Langpack Updates

  • Users who are working with langpacks see their Firefox version flip back to the English with each update because the langpack hasn't been updated yet.

  • At the start of patch download, we now call the add-ons manager to start the langpack update process. We then defer signalling that the update is ready until the language packs are staged.

• Bug 1639067 - Downloadable Filetype Improvements

  • Similar to the work done to allow users opening PDFs to do so in Firefox, we’re adding to the list of file types that we’ll allow you to open with Firefox after downloading them. We’ll now support users who want to open .xml, .avif, .svg, and .webp files in Firefox in addition to .pdfs.

Lint

• Sonia Singla has continued work to enable all rules on toolkit/**/*.xhtml files. Will hopefully be completed this week.
• Also thanks to Duncan Dean for fixing ESLint errors in devtools when eslint-plugin-jest was upgraded.

New Tab Page

• Working on turning newtab Pocket stories on in new regions.

  • English stories for en-US/en-GB browsers in Ireland and India.

  • Creating a generic English story feed to turn use for en-US globally.

  • German stories for de browsers in Austria, Switzerland, and Belgium.

• [jaws] With Shirley we’ll be running an experiment to show the default browser notification toolbar on the New Tab Page

NodeJS

Password Manager

• about:protections doesn't show breached logins if Primary Password is enabled but unlocked
• [Dark Theme Hover feedback is missing in the autocomplete dropdown]
• Indicate to the user when privacy.services.passwordSavingEnabled has set a new value via an extension
• about:logins - if logins list full, scrollbar overlaps with bottom separator
• The Password Import Autocomplete suggestion is displayed on Linux
• Match base domains (eTLD+1) instead of origin for formActionOrigin
• Enable password import suggestions by default and remove pref-experimental code
• Localize password import source-browser name
• [Doorhanger V2 update doorhanger edit telemetry to account for autocomplete]
• Password Generation key icon is no longer blue after generating a password in a form with a confirm password field
• Primary password prompt needs to be cancelled twice after restart
• [Doorhanger V2 pref Doorhanger V2 on in non-Nightly]

PDFs & Printing

• Tab modal print UI work still in full swing, aiming for 81
• Uplifting fixes to beta

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[The Firefox Wikipedia page with a print dialog showing a preview and print settings] Link

Performance

• bigiri has cleared out all of the unit test failures for the ASRouter work, has the about:newtab devtools working, and is now working through mochitest failures
• emalysz has lazified the main appmenu panel, and has patches up to lazify the page action menu

• dthayer is experimenting with a way of getting a faster first paint experience on Windows, drawing a skeleton of the browser window before XUL has even loaded.

  • Demo video. Disabled state, for reference.

• mconley is working on an easier way for front-end developers to add BHR hang annotations
• A reminder that the JS Allocations and Native Allocations settings inside of the Profiler can be used to help detect memory leaks / bloat. This can be useful when about:memory isn’t being particularly forthcoming.

Performance Tools

• Added experimental event delay tracks. They are disabled by default, you need to enable it from the devtools console by calling `experimental.enableEventDelayTracks()`. Example profile
  

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• Added an "Uploaded recordings" page to see your previously uploaded profiles: https://profiler.firefox.com/uploaded-recordings/ More features will be added, like deleting uploaded profiles.
  

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Picture-in-Picture

• Picture-in-Picture should now be compatible with out-of-process iframes
• We’ll be testing some variations on toggle appearance and positioning in Firefox 81.
• User Research is compiling a report based on a week of user studies on the Picture-in-Picture feature. We hope to use this to better inform our future investment in the feature.

Privacy/Security

Remote Protocol (Chrome DevTools Protocol subset)

Search and Navigation

• Search

  • Work is resuming on removing the legacy search configuration from the search service. After that we'll be fixing some larger architectural type issues to get the search service in a better place for future development.

  • There are various bug fixes and improvements to search @alias handling and work on migrating smart keyword bookmarks to search engines alongside user definable engines

• Address Bar

  • Design Update 2 has been enabled in Nightly, currently including Search Mode (unified one-off and @aliases search behavior). - Bug 1658326

    • The feature is usable but not complete yet, when reporting bugs please check open dependencies of the meta Bug 1644572

User Journey

• Packaged new colorful “Alpenglow” theme in 81 available from about:addons and about:welcome

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• Enabled password import suggestion by default in 81 including existing users

  • Allowing opt-out or auto-disable after 3 impressions

• Ability to trigger messages based on the number of times the user has restarted

WebRTC UI

• We’re testing a default placement of the indicator, where it’s placed at the top-center of the last browser that spawned it

• mconley has patches up that update the mic/camera buttons in the new indicator to do global muting

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  • Thanks to jib and pehrsons for the platform support, and to pbz for the reviews

• The new indicator is sticking to Nightly while we continue to refine the UX

This week I learned