Highlights

• The async and await operators have landed in Nightly 52, and are scheduled to ride the trains! Here’s a blog post about it.
• jryans added a Network Throttling tool to Responsive Design Mode
• andym reports that baku has extended the Tabs and Cookies WebExtension APIs to work with Tab Containers
  • Only works when privacy.userContext.enabled is set to true
  • Documentation still forthcoming
• The Add-ons Team is running an experiment in Firefox 51 Beta that will enable e10s for users that have any add-on that has not explicitly opted out of e10s
  • This is the vast majority of add-ons, which means they’re going to be shimmed
  • As usual, will be measuring responsiveness, crash rates, to determine if we’re in a state where we could possibly ship this to release
  • If and when we start rolling out in this state, we’re going to do it nice and slow
  • Additional details
• The Quantum Compositor process has been enabled on Nightly for Windows
  • Basic state and controls added to about:support
• florian wants folks to know that the screen sharing whitelist has been removed in Firefox 52. Users can now authorize screen sharing for any website from a revamped permission prompt that displays a preview of the shared contents and warns loudly in the more risky cases
• kitcambridge reports that Send tab to device is riding trains now (previously was Nightly-only)

Contributor(s) of the Week

• Andr'e Bargull
• Stefan (:stefanh)
• Tomislav Jovanovic (:zombie)
• New Contributors
  • Katharina (:Kaffeekaethe) heroically fixed one of our intermittently failing tests for the AwesomeBar, and then made Ctrl-K focus the AwesomeBar if the Search Bar has been removed from the toolbar and panel!
  • Sourav Garg (:jordan) helped us enable linting in more directories!

Project Updates

Content Handling

• rexlee reports two improvements currently underway for the Downloads Panel:
  • A patch that will unify the spacing and progress bar styling across all platforms
  • A patch that will show more information about a download that has just been initiated

Electrolysis (e10s)

• More patches have landed which should, in theory, help with tab spinners. At the very least, they remove synchronous messages, which is good for performance in general
• A new Telemetry probe has landed to measure how long it takes to paint an entire tab from the perspective of the content process

Firefox Core Engineering

• ddurst reports that we are going to begin prompting users of FF45 to upgrade. Two weeks after 50 is released, we will do the same with FF46
  • Currently, our “orphans” (> 3 versions back) account for 4.9% of our release audience
• A dashboard has been constructed to measure crash rates using Telemetry

Form Auto-fill

• Profile Storage has landed
• Still in progress:
  • Creating an API in the parent process to decide which values of an Auto-fill Profile should be put into which fields
  • Support populating autocomplete results from the Form Auto-fill code

Platform UI and Other Platform Audibles

• lsalzman has been making some perf improvements to box-shadow
• improvements by MSU students are starting to land
  • beachjar landed popup centering for macosx-e10s, but has since been backed out
  • Mark has more styling improvements in the pipe
  • Fred_ and miguel have a patch to combine the e10s and non-e10s
  mechanisms, and it’s in the final rounds of review
• tmaklebust and beachjar have a patch being reviewed that adds a feature for filtering lists with more than 40 elements
• beachjar is starting to look at converging with Edge / Chrome behaviour on styling within the e10s popup

mconley is still working on making it possible to style “checkbox” and “radio” input fields. This landed and bounced, and will hopefully re-land (and uplift) soon

daleharvey has started looking at adding probes to see the ways that people tend to abort page loads

chunmin’s patch for providing a UI for device selection on Firefox for the Presentation API is in the final rounds of review

scottwu has been working on improving the styling of the picker panel

mconley has enabled the Unsubmitted Crash Reports notification for users on early beta or earlier for Firefox 51+.

mconley landed a patch that exposes the preference to automatically submit backlogged crash reports to about:tabcrashed

jessica fixed a bug where the input field for was being cleared unexpectedly when using the up and down cursors

mconley fixed a bug where the autocomplete popup was having its entries truncated too much

The Rust-based URL parser will be landing soon

Privacy / Security

• Insecure login field contextual warning has landed, but is currently preffed off behind security.insecure_field_warning.contextual.enabled
• seanlee is working on showing the login autocomplete UI on password fields
• daleharvey is working on showing the login autocomplete UI on first focus instead of second focus
• timdream landed a patch to show the contextual warnings UI for all username fields, and not just ones that the user has saved login credentials for
• daleharvey is working on a focus bug for login autocomplete

Quality of Experience

• Enabling automatic profile migration again for beta 51 to test its behaviour
• evanxd is working on making Reader Mode links work with
• evanxd also made Reader Mode work on Blogger and Blogspot blogs

Search

• A big number of small patches that optimize our SQLite layer have landed
• Fixed a number of corner-case bugs around search keywords, one-off searches and result selection with Ctrl-Click

Sync / Firefox Accounts

• Bookmark tracking improvements are coming in Firefox 53

Storage Management

• The V1 UX specs are locked down
  • The overall meta bug is here
• Fischer is working on showing the persist-storage permission request notification
• Fischer also has a patch under review to add the Site Data section to about:preferences

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/2016/11/16/these-weeks-in-firefox-issue-5/