The last Firefox Desktop Engineering meeting for 2016 recently occurred! Here are the relevant tidbits.

Highlights

Contributor(s) of the Week

Project Updates

Add-ons

andym reports that the Washington Post Trump article has been updated with the Firefox version of the add-on. This is yet another example of the WebExtensions API making it easy to ship multi-browser add-ons!

Activity Stream

Content Handling Enhancement

Electrolysis (e10s)

Content process crash pings has landed! This means we get (privacy-preserving) stacks for content process crashes for users that have Telemetry enabled

Stability dashboards have been moved to this URL

We’re going to push for encouraging users of 43-47 to update to current (exact date TBD, but before the end of this month).

Work has started to improve the update installation UI UI Mock-ups



Platform UI and other Platform Audibles

jjong landed Bug 1286182 – Implement the layout for <input type=date> This is currently disabled behind dom.forms.datetime and dom.forms.datetime.timepicker

MSU students have finished up their semester – see this update on jaws’ blog, along with their excellent final video presentation Bug 1300784 – Combine e10s and non-e10s <select> dropdown mechanisms A blocking bug autolanded yesterday, this will hopefully land today (preffed off) Bug 1309935 – Add ability to find within select dropdown when over 40 elements Currently undergoing review iterations



Privacy / Security

When a captive portal is detected in Firefox 53, cert error pages will describe the actual problem and provide a link to log in to the captive portal More polish work for captive portal detection to follow!

Editing the location bar will now hide any notification icons that pertain to the currently visible page to avoid confusion about the properties of the page about to be visited

Quality of Experience

Search

Drew posted a first draft of a patch that will allow add-ons to replace the entire AwesomeBar dropdown without having to go through XBL or XUL. This is groundwork to potentially expose this as a WebExtension API.

The SHIELD study for a unified URL and search bar is still ongoing. The results are expected some time in January.

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

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