A big thank you goes out to Johann Hofmann who put these headlines together while I was away on vacation!

Highlights

The Form Autofill feature is being enabled on Nightly this week (for @autocomplete on <input>). Stay tuned!

Firefox Screenshots is in Beta 2 preffed-off by default. We’ll enable it very soon for everyone, or you can jump the gun by toggling extensions.screenshots.system-disabled . If you run into anything fishy, please let #screenshots know

Friends of the Firefox team

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

Project Updates

Add-ons

Please only run WebExtensions and MPC=True add-ons to help us figure out if we are making Firefox faster or not. See this wiki page and bug 1352204.

Want to try out running WebExtensions in their own process? Of course you do. Set extensions.webextensions.remote to true . Bugs welcome!

to . Bugs welcome! ExtensionContent.jsm which is for content scripts is now loaded lazily.

If you’ve got your host permissions wrong for webRequest filters, you’ll get a warning.

We are turning on the new theming API by default, so extension authors get to do simple theming dynamically in WebExtensions.

Activity Stream

Test Pilot Activity Stream Activity Stream support for Pocket has landed in Test Pilot version. Experiment launches May 1st (thanks csadilek!) You can try it now by using the Activity Stream Dev channel Updated to latest eslint-plugin-mozilla which now supports mozilla-central external repositories, but need to disable no-useless-parameters as we support older than Firefox 55 (thanks Standard8!)

Activity Stream system add-on Search feed and UI landed TelemetrySender landed Top Sites feed landed



Flash Telemetry experiment ran on Nightly 55 from April 14 – April 23. Shield Study defaulting to click-to-play will start on Release 53 in the next week and run for six weeks. Default and (slight) additional UI land in 55.

Crash Crash pings contain raw stacks (opt-out) as of Beta 54. Crash pings exist for main, content, and GPU processes as of Beta 54. Crash pings are sent via pingSender (i.e. right away) as of Beta 54. Only one bug did not get uplifted to 54 — a new data point added to the crash ping (a form of client crash id) as of 55. Working on identifying top crashers (by signature) currently. Intending to land while 55 is on Nightly.

Install/Update Continue with phase 1 of the Update Agent, which will continue/complete the download of an update even if a session ends. Looking into trying to encourage users on FF4.0 – FF35.0 to update past 35 prior to September 2017 (when their update server, aus3, expires). Fun with Nahimic: it can (and has) prevented updates. Follow 1356637 for updates.



Mobile

Photon

Performance

Structure

Work starting on page action menu

Ongoing work on the hamburger and overflow panel

Ongoing work on having more than one level of nesting within panel subviews (the slide-to-the-side thing in panels) and update their styling All the previous stuff is / will be behind a pref. We aim to flip that pref on Nightly in the near future!

We swapped the sidebar to the right… and then swapped it back again. Expect more updates to sidebars in the future (with the side of the window stuff still under investigation).

Animation

Animations themselves are in-progress. We intend to use svg spritesheet animations for animating icon states

Visuals

Onboarding

Have walked through questions about the UX and visual specs with verdi from UX in today’s onboarding team meeting.

Fischer is working on the overlay implementation. Will post a patch to gather feedback about the page injection approach and general architecture

Rex joined the team this week, and is working on making the onboarding overlay responsive

Fred is wrapping up his devtool work and will officially join the team after May 1st. He’ll be looking at an autoimport redesign

Preferences

Performance section for Fx55 is being actively worked on, first patch and feedback received

Here’s the spec so far

So far, the user can set the content process count and hardware acceleration settings

Addressing review comments and adding / updating tests

Platform Audibles

Pending results of experiment, Flash will be marked as click-to-activate by default starting soon in nightly. Pending results of SHIELD study this will ride to 55 release.

We’ve got initial page navigation numbers comparing Chrome and Firefox In general we’re competitive with Chrome (+-20%), but a few cases show us far worse, in particular back navigation: filed bug 1359400

A bug that caused windows to be ghosts if touch events were sent is causing large CC pauses in Nightly and Beta. Fix in tomorrow’s Nightly.

Initial data shows that mean-time-between-failure (MTBF) for input jank: MTBF for long input pauses (>2.5s) is 2.27 usage hours MTBF for short pauses (250ms) is 0.29 usage hours See https://gist.github.com/bsmedberg/53b6cc561bb4fc5685abfa175fde3342 Caveats: Pending input when the computer sleeps could inflate this (unlikely) Now fixed Multiple input during a single hang event could inflate this (likely) Being fixed

70+% of nightly users last week saw GC pauses >0.5s

ASK: if you see slow things, please install/use the gecko profiler and file bugs!

Privacy/Security

jkt wrote a blog post about the new “Always Open In This Container” feature in containers.

freddyb is writing a series of ESLint rules to catch common security problems in Firefox code. First victim: Eval and implied eval.

Project Mortar (PDFium)

Three milestones are set for better estimating our release schedule Milestone 1 (target on Q2): feature landing. We are still trying to land our significant bits into mozilla-central, which are: bug 558184 and 1344942: JSPlugin and plugin binary process creation and loading bug 1345330: pull in Chromium source code (PDFium + Pepper API layer) into the tree and build with Firefox bug 1269760: pdf printing (to paper). The most challenged part is converting PDF to EMF printing format on Windows, because we rely on PDFium to do the conversion. This means that the sandbox for plugin binary processes should allow PDFium to create device contexts and even access files. We are discussing with the Sandbox team Milestone 2: release polish. (We haven’t figured out the release target but the conversation is ongoing) focus on performance and stability (meta bug 1286791), telemetry and test automation for future proofing



Milestone 3: script support. will NOT in the first release. Still investigating its product value

New telemetry probes to inform product decisions also landed.

The last big blockers for one-off buttons in the awesomebar have landed. Two small new ones are being dealt with right now.

A bunch of photon-related performance improvements also landed.

Min Vid is celebrating its largest release yet with the addition of a play and history queue. Add media you want to watch to your upcoming queue, or replay something you missed by clicking the history tab. Min Vid currently works on YouTube, SoundCloud, Vimeo, and direct links to audio or video.

is celebrating its largest release yet with the addition of a play and history queue. Add media you want to watch to your upcoming queue, or replay something you missed by clicking the history tab. Min Vid currently works on YouTube, SoundCloud, Vimeo, and direct links to audio or video. Pulse has added occasional (less than once a day) prompting for feedback to help avoid biased data. If you want to help Firefox improve performance on your favorite sites, this is your chance. The data from this experiment goes directly to the Firefox Product team to help prioritize improvements.

has added occasional (less than once a day) prompting for feedback to help avoid biased data. If you want to help Firefox improve performance on your favorite sites, this is your chance. The data from this experiment goes directly to the Firefox Product team to help prioritize improvements. Snooze Tabs has gone world wide now supporting 23 locales. In addition to using Snooze Tabs in your favorite language, you’ll also find an Undo button when deleting a snoozed tab.

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.