The Firefox Desktop team met yet again last Tuesday to share updates. Here are some fresh updates that we think you might find interesting:

Highlights

• The add-ons team is landing more WebExtension APIs, namely: identity, topSites, omniBox
  • If you’re interested in keeping tabs on what WebExtension work is in the pipe, check out their public Trello board
• jaws and mikedeboer are working on the new theming API in the Cedar twig repository. Once ready, it will merge into mozilla-central.
  • Recently landed on Cedar is the ability to set the background image of about:home
• In an effort to reduce e10s tab switch spinners, billm landed a patch that lets us pause GCs to force a paint
• ddurst happily reports that Nightly is currently blocking all NPAPI plugins except for Flash!
  • This is done behind a pref, which will be disabled for ESR 52, but enabled for release 52. In the next cycle, the pref will be removed and this will be hardcoded.
• ddurst also reports that the stub installer will soon be able to install 64-bit versions of Firefox on supported systems
• nhnt11 has returned from his time off, and will now continue his captive portal work!

Contributor(s) of the Week

• adamg2 helped to make the Histograms.json parser more bulletproof!
• Ajay freed us all from some unnecessary code within Telemetry!
• Saad fixed a bug in the AwesomeBar that would occur if a hex code was put in as an address!
• Thau~a Silveira added a new Telemetry probe so that we can get a sense of how often people abort print jobs!

Project Updates

Context Graph

• tobyelliot reports that the Recommendation Engine Experiment has gathered over 2000 volunteer participants
  • Folks who are interested in the data handling practices can read up on them here

Electrolysis (e10s)

• mconley has landed a patch that will annotate hangs that occur in the main thread in the content process during tab switch
  • This should give the team important clues on what kinds of things are causing tab switch spinners
• mrbkap has started an etherpad the brainstorm ways in which e10s-multi might accidentally break some add-ons

Platform UI

• MSU students continue to improve the dropdown
  • Mark has landed the first restyling patch in Nightly
  • tmacklebust and beachjar are making steady progress on the “find” feature, and patches are almost ready for review
  • Fred_ and miguel have a patch to combine the e10s and non-e10s dropdown mechanisms up for review
• seanlee is working on making the autocomplete popup for logins warn you if the form you’re submitting is insecure
• jessica’s patch to add the layout for has landed in Nightly, and scottwu’s patch to add the picker has passed review and should land shortly!

Privacy / Security

• A patch by florian is being reviewed that adds a “Temporarily Blocked” permission state to the permission panel
• past has a patch being reviewed to convert our content permission popup notifications to have 2 visible buttons instead of the current drop down menu

Search

• mak fixed a regression in how we collect Telemetry on how many searches are completed within the AwesomeBar

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.

https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2016/10/17/these-weeks-in-firefox-issue-3/