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

Priorities for Fx60 (what we are currently working on): Prefs: migrating newtab sidebar preferences to about:preferences Porting existing sections checkboxes from React to XUL Adding new customizations: section rows, reorganize “Home” section Highlights: adding new data types starting with Pocketed items Message Center: generalizing messages and notifications Start with Onboarding Tour and Snippets Eventually for centralized notifications even for non-UI features Perceived Performance: developing process to produce weekly Activity Stream timing videos for analysing perf



XUL flexbox emulation into CSS flexbox can be enabled with the layout.css.emulate-moz-box-with-flex pref. Next: get it running in automation to track performance compared with XUL flex (metabug)

XUL overlay removal breakdown (metabug)

There’s a new components.css UA sheet for migrating XBL <resource> sheets into (bug)

Sylvestre is working on integrating codespell as a lint option. Initially limited to tools/lint and python/mozlint



Mobile

We shipped Firefox 10.4 for iOS which addresses performance issues in location bar autocomplete

We are about to ship the first beta of Firefox 11.0 for iOS. Two bigger themes of this release will be Tracking Protection and iPad improvements

We moved a testing tool, MappaMundi, from out of the main repo to a separate project — it is of general interest to iOS developers who use XCUITests. One of our engineers called it “The Missing Piece” of UI testing.

Firefox for Fire TV 1.1 shipped, with Turbo Mode (e.g. tracking protection) and better Accessibility

Performance

Privacy/Security

Address Bar & Search

Places

More

Sync / Firefox Accounts

New and improved bookmark merging has landed! \o/ This is a significant under-the-hood change to how we apply synced bookmarks, and should fix long-standing issues with Sync scrambling bookmarks, smushing folders, and undoing changes. Special thanks to :mak, :markh, :rnewman, and :tcsc for their reviews and guidance! There’s an explainer doc with an overview. We’ll begin dogfooding within the Sync team, and send out a post to firefox-dev@ once we’re ready to have more folks try. Bug 1433177 tracks enabling it by default. If you’re feeling adventurous, you can back up your places.sqlite, flip the services.sync.engine.bookmarks.buffer pref, and restart Firefox.

Edouard is almost done removing event loop spinning from Sync, which significantly cleans up the code and should make for cleaner perf profiles.

Thom is improving bookmark deletion to avoid resurrecting deleted items. There’s a sync-dev@ thread with some discussion.

Various performance improvements.

Tab Split and ThemesRFun experiment development is now underway.

The Test Pilot team is learning about WebExtension API Experiments and Embedded Experiments for use implementing future Test Pilot experiments.

Snooze Tabs is gearing up to graduate.

MinVid is preparing to move into a Shield study.

The Test Pilot website has new “Featured Experiment” UI which will be turned on in the next sprint.

Screenshots: Toolbar button vs Page Action menu: yes, we’re seeing less usage having moved the button there, but our usage has been remarkably steady: screenshots is becoming a module. Ianb owner, 6a68 peer. we’ve updated our dev process to land early in the cycle and avoid uplifts Ian is participating in the github-bugzilla discussions, more to come

