Firefox/Meeting/17-Jan-2017

Actions from last meeting

• Next meeting master is: felipe

General Topics / Roundtable

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

• [mconley] Shipping “dev edition” theme as a built in!
  • [bgrins] this is now in nightly (landed in bug 1314091), here’s a post about it: https://www.ghacks.net/2017/01/16/firefox-new-default-theme-theme-api-makes-an-appearance/. Still a few blockers hoping to wrap up this week - including applying lwt in pb windows (bug 854126), mozscreenshots integration (bug 1329262), trimming ‘recommended’ list in customize mode (bug 1323833), and debugging a small talos regression (bug 1331449).
  • [bgrins] new icon for default theme. Also now it’s hidpi in about:addons (bug 1329207 / https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=8825509)
• [mconley] Deprecating XUL in new UI discussion thread
• [mconley] GPU Process Experiment Results
• [florian] Services.io.newURI’s last 2 parameters are now optional, and eslint will report trailing null parameters (bug 1329182). Useless trailing parameters will also be reported by eslint for addEventListener (bug 1331081), removeEventListener, removeObserver (bug 1330147), clearUserPref and get{Char,Bool,Int}Pref (bug 1330464). 🔥
• [mconley] Project Conduit post

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/2i6qaz6 and https://mzl.la/2k1aTnL
  • More than one bug fixed:
    • Jalen Adams
    • Pavan Karthik [:matrixisreal]
    • Sebastian Hengst [:aryx][:archaeopteryx]
    • Vishnu (:malayaleecoder)
    • Edouard Oger [:eoger]
    • Kestrel
    • Tomer Cohen :tomer
    • Tomislav Jovanovic :zombie
    • Pawan Sasanka
  • New contributors:
    • Alan
    • Aman Dwivedi
    • Laurent
    • Jalen Adams
    • Mayank
    • Srivatsav Gunisetty
    • Vedant Sareen
    • Vlad Zuga

Project Updates

Add-ons

• Still on course for permissions appearing on installation in Firefox 53
• WebExtensions side bar support mvp likely in Firefox 53
• Chrome.storage.sync on course for shipping in Firefox 53

Activity Stream

• [Mardak] Team meeting in San Francisco to figure out Q1 OKRs focusing on MVP/Graduation

Content Handling Enhancement

• Visual Redesign of Downloads Panel on track for Firefox 52
• Functional and Strings Redesign of Downloads Panel in Firefox 53 or 54
• Continuing platform work on registerProtocolHandler user interface improvements and RDF deprecation

Electrolysis (e10s)

• a11y support for e10s has been bumped to Firefox 53
• Tab switch spinner graphs now show a breakdown of the 0ms - 999ms bucket
  • Also showing a nice win from bug 1323319 landing!
• e10s-multi (2 content processes by default)
  • Several e10s-multi talos regressions have been cleared
  • A fix for a shutdown leak in automation should land soon
  • Still aiming to have this landed shortly by default on Nightly (will hold on Nightly until we’re happy with stability and performance)
• The next major release (51) has a number of e10s improvements that we’re excited about:
  • JS interruption should make tab switching more responsive
  • e10s is being re-enabled for eligible users in the ru locale
  • A bunch of popular add-ons are being whitelisted for enabling e10s
    • 52 is an ESR release, but the add-ons rules will be the same as 50 (only add-ons that are explicitly compatible will allow e10s to be enabled).
• Heads up - the Performance API has been skipping process start time and IPC transit time. Fix in progress. Relevant bug.
• We estimate that we will have more than 50% of our release channel users on e10s once 51 has fully saturated.

Firefox Core Engineering

• Stacks are included in crash pings on Nightly only (so far). Pending plan is to extend this to release in Firefox 53.
• Content process crashes now report via their own ping (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1293656).
• About to land pingSender (just finishing tests today), which sends pings via separate executable and will allow us to see final crashes and (an as-yet-unknown amount of) startup crashes (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1310703).
• Flash default-as-CTP SHIELD experiment targeted for Firefox 52 release (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1277346).
• Updating the Update UI in Q1 (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=893505).
• symbolapi.m.o rewrite in QA currently. We may need some docker help, as this is not our bailiwick. (This is a potential blocker for client-side stackwalking.)
  • [mconley]: The Firefox Engineering Productivity team uses Docker (mcote’s team)
• In case you missed it, we’ve removed dead dashboards from telemetry.m.o (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1324526).

Form Autofill

• Landed:
  • Support populating autocomplete results from form autofill code
  • Implement ProfileAutoCompleteResult for Profile Form Fill usage only
  • [Form Autofill] Change the feature flag to browser.formautofill.experimental
  • Connect satchel autocomplete to form autofill results instead of form history when appropriate
• In Progress:
  • Implement two column layout for profile item binding
  • add a new profile item <binding> and make rich-result-popup append item accordingly
  • Fallback to form history if form autofill pref is disabled
  • Fallback to form history if there is no form autofill profile saved
  • Fill the autocomplete result with real profile by using profile storage API
  • Fill the selected autofill profile when an autocomplete entry is chosen
  • Need to have a place in the Preference -> Setting for users to launch the profile list add/edit/remove dialog

Platform UI and other Platform Audibles

• jjong and scottwu have landed the DatePicker UI!
  • Still disabled by default behind dom.forms.datetime
  • 😻[[Image:]]

• The Adobe Primetime CDM is being removed

Privacy/Security

• Chipping away at the last remaining permissions project bugs before the end of this cycle. Also, blogged about it.
• Another blog post coming up soon about the insecure login field warning, which has received more polish. Remaining bugs.
• Captive portal still on track to ship in 52. Last bits of polish just landed and are being uplifted.

Quality of Experience

• Final work for onboarding funnelcake (will go live shortly into 51 release cycle)
• Started work on new-style themes, initial webextension parsing has landed and support for lightweight themes is first up
• Find bar highlight tweaking is ongoing
• Preferences project (bug 1324168) to remove inconsistencies and reorg continues to move forward
  • The students have been assigned to the project and assigned their first bugs
  • Jalen Adams and Jared Beach (two contributors that are not in the student team) have also fixed a few bugs related to the project
  • Meta bug
  • “Inconsistencies” living spec
  • Re-organization living spec
• Sessionstore team getting more organized and working on reliability, performance and new features in that order. Triage done, ready for contributors!
  • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1330633, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1330635, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1330638

Search

• Shipped a Cliqz Test Pilot experiment in Germany.
• Preliminary results from the unified search shield study look promising. Will post the final results and decision when we have them.
• Making slow progress on hi-res favicons.
• Standard8 landed more eslint goodness recently (also working towards no-undef enabling).

This week I learned

• [MattN] https://analysis.telemetry.mozilla.org Spark clusters come with a great example iPython/Jupyter notebook (including keyed histogram examples) installed so it’s not as scary as it used to be.
  • Scheduled Spark jobs simply run a Jupyter Notebook on a schedule with a permalink to the latest results
  • https://wiki.mozilla.org/Telemetry/Custom_analysis_with_spark
  • [mconley] You can run automated jobs and have it dump out JSON which can be exposed publicly. I use this to power the spinner severity graphs in my e10s tab switch spinner dashboard