Highlights

Friends of the Firefox team

(Give a shoutout/thanks to people for helping fix and test bugs. Introductions)

Project Updates

Add-ons

Many performance improvements in WebExtension start up from working with Screenshots team. Most of these have been documented by Ehsan, but check out bug 1363905 for more detail.

Support for Implement support for $0 and inspect bindings in devtools.inspectedWindow.eval has landed which means some of the large developer tools add-ons (React, Redux, Ember) etc from Chrome should now be working on Firefox 55! Check out this tweet.

devtools.panels.themeName support has landed

browser_style is now available in browser actions, options UI and the sidebar

Activity Stream

Check out the Activity Stream Newsletter sent to firefox-dev for the latest updates!

Just started week 4 of the Flash Shield Study. Nightly 55 has click-to-activate (CTA) as the default setting. Beta 55 will see a gradual rollout of CTA, though domain blocking will be active for everyone.

Startup crashes from BaseThreadInitThunk has been fixed in 55. This prevents early DLL injection by third parties in some cases (which is against policy anyway), so check that bug if you’re dealing with an injection-related crash.

Mobile

As part of “make sync better” efforts, landed Sync Ping in Fennec Nightly, which should provide a telemetry about the health of Sync on FxAndroid.

Photon

Performance

Structure

The hamburger panel is now feature-complete! (minor caveat: the library subview is shared with the library button, which is not feature-complete yet)

The page action menu now has a bookmark item (as well as the synced tabs subview) Still to come: Pocket & Screenshots

There’s a veeeeery-initial library button + panel available now. Probably not worth testing yet, but it’s available in the palette.

Greening up tests so we can flip the photon structure pref by default on nightly builds.

Animation

Jared landed bug 1364221 which allows us to run more animations on the compositor for added smoothness.

Jared is getting close in bug 1355924 to adding an animation for the refresh/stop button

Sam is working in bug 1352065 to implement a new download animation.

Jim is working on a new tab loading indicator in bug 1352119.

Visuals

Onboarding

Preferences

The Performance section of about:preferences has had all P1 bugs fixed, and is ready for testing. The plan is to ship this in Firefox 55 in the “old” about:preferences organization.

Have landed bugs for updating strings in about:preferences Spec

The team is working on improving search highlighting in about:preferences to include sub-dialogs and fixing some highlight/tooltip glitches.

Here’s the updated about:preferences re-org spec that we’re aiming to ship in Firefox 56. It’s very close to being finalized. The spec for Search behaviour is also being finalized.

Platform Audibles

The Simplify Page feature in Print Preview has been enabled by default in Firefox 55 for Windows Big shout out to mlongaray from HP who has been working hard on this



Project Mortar (PDFium)

JSPlugin architecture is now in m-c! (hooray!)

Given that all facts pointing out Pepper API isn’t future-proof, the team is re-evaluating how to integrate PDFium without Pepper API layer.

QA for one-off buttons and search suggestions in the Location Bar is ongoing

Fixed some bugs found by QA

Some misc fixes to the Location Bar and some more correctness fixes to Favicons

Preparation work to run future Unified Location Bar preference-based Shield studies

Shipped a system add-on in release to add telemetry for follow-on searches. Working on landing it in m-c, too.

Sync / Firefox Accounts

:eoger landed improvements to the “send tab to device” experience in Photon

Here are the raw meeting notes that were used to derive this list.

Want to help us build Firefox? Get started here!

Here’s a tool to find some mentored, good first bugs to hack on.