The team is busy sanding down the last few rough edges, and getting Firefox 57 ready to merge to beta! So busy in fact, that there are no screenshots or GIFs for this blog post. Sorry!

If you’re hankering for a more visual update, check out dolske’s Photon Engineering Newsletter #15!

Highlights

Friends of the Firefox team

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

Project Updates

Add-ons

Activity Stream

Browser Architecture

Problems with XBL have been documented

A de-XBL meta bug exists

An architecture review process is being developed

Check out our last newsletter!

Bug 1390703 – Flash Click-to-Play being increased to 25% on Release 55, (hopefully) shortly followed to 100%

Bug 1397562 – Update staging is now disabled on OSX and Linux (update staging was disabled on Windows in bug 1397562). This is in response to what we think may be an issue with e10s sandboxing. This is why you may suddenly be seeing a flash of the “Nightly is applying updates” (like in bug 1398641).

Bug 1380252, bug 1380254 – Optimized data in crash reports and crash ping processing.

Open call for ideas/investigation on bug 1276488 — suspected omnijar corruption, but not much to go on.

Mobile

Firefox iOS 8.3 Shipped last week and contains primarily bug fixes

Firefox iOS 9.0 has been sent to QA for final verification and is expected to ship next week. It is a fantastic release with the following highlights: Support for syncing your mobile bookmarks between all your devices Tracking Protection will be enabled by default for Private mode and can be enabled for Regular Mode Large improvements in our data storage layer that should improve performance and stability Many small bug fixes Compatibility with iOS 11 (which likely ships next week)



Photon

Performance

For 57 we had to disable tab warming when hovering tabs because it caused more regressions than we are comfortable fixing for 57. We are now planning to ship this significant perf improvement in 58.

All the significant performance improvements we are still working on at this point are at risk for 57 because we are trying to avoid risk.

Structure

Animation

Investigation ongoing for bug 1397092 – high cpu usage possibly caused by new 60fps tab loading indicator

Fatter download progressbar bug 1387557 in for review, is last animation feature planned for 57

Polishing, please report any glitches you see