It is hard to believe that we've gotten to the twentieth of these newsletters. That also means that we're very quickly approaching the finish line for this sprint. We only have a bit more than five more weeks to go before Firefox 57 merges to beta. It may be a good time to start to think more carefully about what we pay attention to in the remaining time, both in terms of the risk of patches landing, and the opportunity cost of what we decide to put off until 58 and the releases after.

We still have a large number of triaged bugs that are available for someone to pick up and work on. If you have some spare cycles, we really would appreciate if you consider picking one or two bugs from this list and working on them. They span many different areas of the codebase so finding something in your area of interest and expertise should hopefully be simple. Quantum Flow isn't the kind of project that requires fixing every single one of these bugs to be finished successfully, but at the same time big performance improvements often consist of many small parts, so the cumulative impact of a few additional fixes can make a big impact.

It is worth mentioning that lately while lurking on various tech news and blog sites where Nightly users comment, I have seen quite a few positive comments about Nightly performance from users. It's easy to get lost in the details of the work involved in getting rid of synchronous IPCs, synchronous layout/style flushes, unnecessary memory allocations, hashtable lookups, improving data locality, JavaScript JIT performance, making sure code gets inlined better, ship a new CSS engine, etc. etc. but it is reassuring to see people take notice. :-)

Moving on to mention one point about Speedometer charts on AWFY which I have gotten a few questions about recently. We now have Speedometer benchmark numbers on Firefox Beta on the reference hardware reported in addition to inbound optimized and PGO builds. You may notice that the benchmark score numbers we are getting on Beta are around the same as Nightly (which swings around 83-84 these days). This doesn't mean that we haven't made any improvements on Nightly since the last Beta merge! We have some Nightly only telemetry code and some features that are only enabled on the Nightly channel, and those add a bit of overhead, which causes us to see a bit of an improvement after an uplift from mozilla-central to mozilla-beta without any code changes. This means that when the current code on Nightly gets merged to Beta 57, we should expect a bit of an improvement similarly.

And now let me take a moment to acknowledge the work of some of those who helped make Firefox faster last week. I hope I'm not dropping anyone's name mistakenly.