Firefox/Meeting/29-Aug-2017

General Topics / Roundtable

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

• [bgrins]

  • For talos pushes, this syntax should be sufficient to prevent unnecessary builds and also the ‘more runs are needed warning’ on perfherder: ./mach try -b o -p linux64,macosx64,win32,win64 -u none -t all --rebuild-talos 6

    • Can also include --artifact if you only have frontend changes but aren’t using artifact builds locally

  • Browser Toolbox can be opened on more than one instance

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/2xJHvoO

  • More than one bug fixed:

    • :prathiksha
    • Dan Banner
    • Henry Chang [:hchang]
    • Kate Ustiuzhanina
    • Masatoshi Kimura [:emk]
    • Simon Lindholm
    • Tim Nguyen :ntim
    • flyingrub

  • New contributors (🌟 = First Patch!)

Project Updates

Add-ons

• Added API events for containers (ContextualIdentities) for onUpdated, onCreated and onRemoved
• More fixes for[1]webextension performance issues.
• Added support for suggest_url to chrome_settings_overrides.search_provider.
• Added support for tab.openerTabId.
• Added support for estimatedEndTime in DownloadItem.
• Added openPopup to browserAction and pageAction, and open/close to sidebarAction.
• Code was added to allow extensions which use containers to enable container support automatically.
• Added UI for flagging long running WebExtension scripts and providing the option to stop them.
• Enhanced themes to allow for changing urlbar and search input background and text color.
• Added support for setting the default search engine to a built in engine.
• Introduced a new Find API, which includes find, highlightResults and removeHighlighting.
• Added an API for privacy.websites.trackingProtectionMode.
• Various fixes for webRequest, sidebars and proxies.

Activity Stream

• Pref’d on to 10% of Beta 56 en-US (opt-out Shield study), next is 50%, then lots of locales including with Pocket in Germany (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wizj95pDfb4YTc2kDxTJn5TIm7SwGetAsn1e0OgeOh4/edit)
• Activity Stream on about:home landed pref’d off (for now) in Nightly
• Crucial site summary metadata (hi-res icons and article thumbnail/description) patch is currently in review. Landing site summary metadata will improve Top Sites and un-block landing Highlights section
• Activity Stream - Test Pilot (2016/05/11 - 2017/08/28 RIP) 😔 🏴

Electrolysis (e10s)

• No updates this week.

Firefox Core Engineering

• No updates this week - everything since the 15th is still in progress.

Form Autofill

• Address autofill with sync is now enabled on beta 56 for en-US builds in the US!
• Focus is on polishing address autofill and feature completion for credit cards

• Fixed

  • Unhide addresses sync engine by default

  • (Form Autofill) Add probe for form autofill availability

  • (Form Autofill) The hint message always shows "Also autofills name" even no name-related fields saved in storage

  • Duplicate addresses stored because of numeric state

  • (Form Autofill) Warn users on credit card fields that are not secure

  • (Form Autofill) Consider showing the intersection of results' categories and form's categories instead of the all categories in also fill note

  • (Form Autofill) Handle credit card number encryption while normalizing

  • (Form Autofill) Always adopt autocomplete attribute and the info should not be changed.

  • Create MasterPassword.jsm to provide async wrappers around crypto-SDR and handle existing dialogs

  • (Form Autofill) Add addresses sync checkbox in first time saving doorhanger

  • (Form Autofill) Implement credit card dropdown style

  • (Form Autofill) Implement offline heuristics to determine Credit Card related fields

  • (Form Autofill) Properly fill cc-exp/cc-exp-month/cc-exp-year into a select element

  • (Form Autofill) Support credit card record filling and previewing in FormAutofillHandler

  • (Form Autofill) Decrypt credit card number for filtering when MasterPassword is disabled

  • (Form Autofill) Dialog to add/edit/view a credit card profile

  • (Form Autofill) Allow users to enable/disable credit card autofill and launch the list dialog in about:preferences

  • (Form Autofill) Allow users to view the list of credit card profiles

  • (Form Autofill) Prompt a door hanger to ask users whether to save a credit card profile when users submit a form

  • (Form Autofill) Wrap up masterpassword decrypt API in FormAutofillHandler

  • (Form Autofill) Preview decrypted credit card numbers when MasterPassword isn't set

  • Various wpt autocomplete tests are going to permafail when Gecko 57 merges to Beta on 2017-09-18

  • (Form Autofill) Optimize "findLabelElements" function

  • Intermittent browser/extensions/formautofill/test/browser/browser_autocomplete_marked_detached_tab.js | Uncaught exception - popup should be open - timed out after 50 tries.

  • [a11y Feedback needed for Form Autofill UX design]

  • (Form Autofill) Enable credit card feature according to "extensions.formautofill.creditCards.enabled" pref

  • Uplift Form Autofill system add-on for 56 beta

  • (Form Autofill) Improve the performance before calling identifyAutofillFields

• In Progress

  • Form Autofill preferences should support search function

  • [Creditcard Autofill Collect information on how many times did users apply credit card autofill]

  • (Form Autofill) - Record one for each non-empty field at submission time (keyed by fieldName)

  • (Form Autofill) Collect information on how much time users spent on page with forms (w/wo form autofill)

  • [Creditcard Autofill Collect information on how many users save creditcard information]

  • (Form Autofill) Add "Learn more" links to SUMO pages in preferences

Lint

• ESLint now enabled for toolkit/components/osfile
• No-caller now enabled across the tree (disallow deprecated calls to arguments.callee / arguments.caller)

Photon

Performance

• mconley added a reflow test to the AwesomeBar for when it accepts key inputs
• mconley also landed a patch that pre-emptively warms up tabs that we think we’re likely to switch to: we are doing this on mouse hover on tabs, and early telemetry data shows a spectacular reduction of tab switch times
• Florian is working on reducing flickering when opening new windows, when moving tabs between windows, and when opening tabs. When opening a new browser window, the toolbar doesn’t flicker anymore, and gandalf is working on eliminating the ‘new tab’ tab title that still flickers.
• Paolo landed a patch to remove one of the slow sync reflows of the awesomebar panel, and Kris has updated patches to limit sync reflows in the awesomebar to at most one per frame.
• Evelyn made it so that when we tell the content process to load a URI, we first initiate a speculative connection in the parent process so that we don’t have to wait for the content process to request network access for the connection to be set up.

Structure

• A “Bookmarking Tools” subview has been added to the Library button so you can easily get to the bookmarks toolbar, sidebar, and bookmarks menu button

  • Here's an animated GIF!

• You might have noticed that the downloads button will only appear when downloads exist and isn't movable anymore. This is something we're still tinkering with, so stay tuned.

  • A Downloads view will be added to the Library soon, which is part of the grander strategy. Again, please stay tuned!

• We made the sync animation prettier! Check it out!
• The order of items in the URLBar has been updated.
• Keyboard navigation in Photon-style panels now remembers the last selected item.
• Many more polish bugs landed or in progress.

Animation

• Landed the new tab loading indicator and the “burst” across the tab when the page load is complete.
• A new “Copy URL” and “Send to Device” confirmation popup landed on autoland and should be merged to mozilla-central very soon.
• Various fixes to animations of the library button, tab loading indicator in RTL, pocket icon corruption.

Visuals

• Polish polish polish:

  • Sidebar stuff landed, followups

  • New notification bars

  • Updated media icon

  • Updates to misc. icons and tab styling

Onboarding

• No updates this week.

Preferences

• No updates this week.

Platform Audibles

• No updates this week.

Privacy/Security

• We are getting more (and more interesting) data from the Improved Privacy Settings shield study:
  

https://sql.telemetry.mozilla.org/dashboard/shield-study-improve-privacy-settings

• tl;dr - Tracking Protection is very promising: very low breakage. Peter Dolanjski is arranging an opt-out follow-up study to measure acquisition & retention for users with tracking protection enabled.
• First-Party Isolation is the most problematic - higher breakage, and lots of login failures which are associated with users disabling the study.
• Talk to Luke Crouch (groovecoder on IRC, or email) if you have any specific questions!
• Prathiksha has been working on making the hostname more visible in permissions prompts (by making it bold, bug 1369482)

Search and Navigation

• Location Bar:

  • Search suggestions now include one historical suggestion from form history

  • The Location bar can now interrupt an ongoing sqlite query when starting a new search. Since all the searches are serialized, this means we can react faster to user input

  • Evelyn enabled Speculative connections on mousedown for the location bar results

  • A new contributor, Simon Lindholm, provided various patches to speed up the location bar searches (some still in-flight):

    • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1387780
    • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1388331
    • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1393486

• Search

  • The Follow-on Search Add-on has been updated to v0.9.3 to fix problems with the recent changes to Google

• Places:

  • Continued squashing Places Async Transactions regression bugs

  • Fixed a notification issue so that we can skip some notification in Places Views

  • Improved performance of the Recently Bookmarked menu entries so that it doesn’t slow down bookmarks removal

  • Ryan contributed a patch to generate guids more efficiently on bookmarks creation

  • A user reported his bookmarks toolbar taking more than 200MB of memory. Working on a patch to reduce memory usage and speed up populating it that should help when opening a new window (included the first one).

• Downloads and Apps

  • Fixed a bug with the placeholder file of blocked downloads

  • Handlers.json is now read asynchronously

• Misc:

  • Sqlite has been updated twice in a week, to fix a memory leak discovered by Thunderbird in the new version

  • Investigating a more responsive way to chunk results from mozStorage async statements, may help most consumers.

  • StopIteration has been removed from Sqlite.jsm. The onRow callback now gets a canceler function as second argument.

Sync / Firefox Accounts

• No updates this week.

Test Pilot

• Screenshots has been rolled out to 5% of release users.
• Activity Stream is now completely out of Test Pilot.
• The Test Pilot website is now fully off l20n and on fluent-react, fixing some long standing issues.
• We have added an l10n branch which will allow us to better batch strings going into and out of pontoon. Strings on master will not go to pontoon until master has been merged to l10n, and strings from pontoon will not go to master until l10n has been merged into master.

Web Payments

• Read-only: (No major updates since Jonathan’s internship is done. MattN has been trying to fix test failures in one patch that blocks others from landing.)

This week I learned

• [mikedeboer] “SVG when loaded as-a-document (in iframe, etc.) can run script and load external resources. When it's loaded as-an-image (<img>, 'background-image', etc.) it is blocked from running script or loading external resources.” - :jwatt