Highlights

about:addons now has a legacy tag to show when an extension is not a WebExtension and addons.mozilla.org now specifically tags WebExtensions as compatible on Firefox 57!

a WebExtension and addons.mozilla.org now specifically tags WebExtensions as compatible on Firefox 57! The Activity Stream Test Pilot now shows recommended stories from Pocket, and you can try the first bits of the Activity Stream integration in Firefox on Nightly by switching the pref browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.enabled

Mike Conley published a new article on MDN: Performance best practices for Firefox front-end engineers

Edouard Oger refactored the Sync UI code, resulting in some impressive Talos improvements for browser start-up and window opening

The awesomebar now prefers https to http more often than before.

The latest Firefox for iOS v7.x releases have resulted in a 60% decline of our crashes and have resolved many user reported issues!

Friends of the Firefox team

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

MattN would like to welcome to intern JonathanGB who will be working on form history improvements. He landed his first patch on day 1!

Resolved bugs (excluding employees): https://mzl.la/2q0LGdq Avikalpa Kundu [:kalpa] Dan Banner Kevin Jones 🌟 Ashhar Hasan made it so that the password manager list doesn’t send you back to the top after a password is removed (13 year-old bug!) More than one bug fixed: New contributors (🌟 = First Patch!)



Project Updates

Add-ons

Electrolysis (e10s)

gabor turned on the pre-allocated process manager, which should improve the perceived performance of opening tabs and windows in new processes

mconley is currently fixing a regression in the tab switch spinner metric

e10s-multi A/B test is currently underway on Beta

e10s-a11y support still targeted for Firefox 55

Shield Study defaulting Flash to click-to-play (Plugin Safety) has begun on Release 53 and will run through June 15.

Mobile

Photon

Performance

We are working on deterministic perf tests for sync reflows and files loaded too early during startup Sync layout and style flush tests will be in browser/base/content/test/performance. When these become available, make sure to run these when you add Photon-y things!

Expect big patches to land to stop using Task.jsm in browser/ and toolkit/, and stop using the non standard Promise.defer from promise.jsm If you have WIP patches for these folders, consider landing them soon to avoid bitrot.



Animation

Looks like we now have SVG sprites for the various animations, will begin putting the animations in to the browser Example animation

Jaws landed code to transition the selected tab to its destination when reordering tabs

The old download indicator – the seconds countdown and progressbar in the toolbar – was kept around when the new arrow-style indicator landed. It is now gone as we prepare for photon changes.

Visuals

Onboarding

Fischer and Rex and Fred report that the team has been iterating on the overlay prototype for the onboarding experience The team is in discussions with the Activity Stream team to figure out how the overlay will integrate with the Activity Stream page The team is also sorting out integration with Firefox Account log-in, and Automigration The onboarding overlay experience is currently being developed as a system add-on



Preferences

timdream reports that the team has almost finished scoping out the work for this project, and that this wiki page is a great way to track the team as they work

Please file about:preferences bugs! Preferably blocking the right meta bugs.

Privacy/Security

jkt is looking into rewriting containers to use WebExtensions instead of the Addon SDK

Our three Outreachy interns for May 30 – August 30 were announced last week: Prathiksha G – Site Permission Management UI 🎉 Princiya Marina Sequeira & Bianca Danforth – Upgrade Lightbeam 🎉



Project Mortar (PDFium)

The team is still working on landing the HUGE patches of Chromium PDFium source code into m-c.

PDF printing integration is ongoing.

JSPlugin architecture is broken by lately m-c changes, Peterv is fixing.

A new SHIELD study for unifying the search and location bars went live.

Some Places, bookmarks and one-off search fixes.

Some followups around hi-res favicons.

Sync / Firefox Accounts

We’re modernizing the codebase with async functions. This should eventually get unrelated Sync code out of profiler stacks.

We are working on integrating Screenshots into Firefox 54. There are some final perf issues with Talos tests and some work still remaining to get tests working. Special thanks to Mark Banner and Kris Maglione for their help.

We are working to graduate experiments or migrate to WebExtensions before the Addon SDK deprecation in Firefox 57.

A News Feed feature is coming to the Test Pilot website soon, check out the designs.

MacOS hackers: We need help with a Min Vid windowing bug (the player doesn’t always stay always-on-top): https://github.com/meandavejustice/min-vid/issues/619

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.