Highlights

• A reminder that Firefox ESR 52 will be the last version to support WinXP
  • Relevant mailing list thread.
• past reports that the new permission doorhanger UI has landed!
  • 
  • Permission prompts are no longer accidentally dismissable
  • Available actions are more prominent, not just the main one
  • Working on followups in mozilla-central. Notice problems? File them blocking this bug.
• ralin reports that the new HTML-based visual video controls have landed!
  • 
• florian and MattN report that the insecure password warning in the URL bar will ship in Firefox 51!
• They also note that work on the contextual warning for insecure passwords made great progress and is currently slated for Firefox 52.
  • Flip security.insecure_field_warning.contextual.enabled to true and signon.autofillForms.http to false to test the feature.
• kitcambridge wants people to know that a new add-on has been released to let you examine your own Sync data. As always, the source is also available
  • He also has a call-to-action to validate your bookmarks data (see this mailing list thread and this follow-up post for how to contribute anonymized validator data)

Contributor(s) of the Week

• Please welcome Joe Hildebrand, who has joined Mozilla as Director of Engineering for the Firefox browsers!
• Resolved bugs (excluding employees): https://mzl.la/2gcieyv
• New Contributors
  • catdesk made how we use SpecialPowers.pushPrefEnv in one of our tests way cleaner!

Project Updates

Add-ons

• The team has published a blog post on what’s new for WebExtensions in Firefox 52
• They’re also testing out chrome.storage.sync and working on getting backend storage into release quality

Electrolysis (e10s)

• Turning on e10s-multi on Nightly (with 2 content processes) is blocked on Talos regressions and a few test failures. This should happen sometime soon during the Nightly 53 cycle (and hold on Nightly)

Firefox Core Engineering

• ddurst reports that there is going to be an aggressive push to update “orphaned” Firefox installs (44-47, inclusive) between now and the end of 2016
  • “Orphaned” = not updated since 2 versions back.
  • Concerted effort to encourage people to update from 42-47 to current (50). 42-25 isn’t a huge chunk, but this is a much more aggressive push.
  • What causes orphans?
    • Some are just users being slow to update
    • Blocked by security suite. (Avast was trying to update on users’ behalf). Some are worked out with vendors, some are actual problems.
    • Some are related to network latency (bugs have been filed and fixed), but ddurst’s team just got a machine that’s not updating and not affected by latency.
  • 3.x upgrades
    • This is something we’ll turn our attention to once the 42+ orphan level is deemed acceptable
    • Issuing updates as minor for 3.x and lower, hopefully

Form Auto-fill

• MattN wants to draw everyone’s attention to the intent to implement for DOM Web Payments API. That team is coordinating schedules with the Form Auto-fill team.

Platform UI and Other Platform Audibles

• mconley reports that the ability to style -moz-appearance: none checkbox and radio input form fields has landed on central! Aiming to try to uplift to 52.
• daleharvey made it so that we can show the login manager autocomplete popup on focus (this bug was reported 10 years ago!)
• scottwu has a patch up for review that adds a datepicker (to complement the timepicker that was recently added). Link to very detailed spec.
• A patch from MSU students Fred_ and miguel to combine the e10s and non-e10s dropdown mechanisms will likely land this week (but preffed off)
• A patch by MSU student beachjar that vertically centers the dropdown at the selected element will re-land soon now that he’s fixed this bug

Privacy / Security

• nhnt11 has simplified the way we open captive portal tabs

Quality of Experience

• mikedeboer reports that the demo / ideation phase for the new Theming API is nearly finished
  • An engineering plan in the making, and almost ready for feedback rounds
  • The team is looking at performance measures now (memory, new window creation, tab opening, etc)
• dolske has some onboarding updates:
  • 51 Beta is now live with the latest automigration test/data-gathering. (No wizard on startup, migrates and gives option to undo)
  • Gijs is starting work on allowing automigration-undo even after activating Sync
  • In discussions with verdi about an updated first-run experience (nutshell: simplified, focus on new-tab page so user can quickly see familiar auto-migrated data, starting point for low-key introduction of features)
    • Fewer tabs, sign in to FxA, and then directly to about:newtab. (If you migrated from Chrome, your top sites will be there)

Search

• florian reports that recent Places changes improved the performance of coloring visited links in a page and the performance of searching through history
• The team has also fixed the display of Open Search providers on sites that provide a huge amount of them

Sync / Firefox Accounts

• Sync tracker improvements have landed! Please file bugs if you have bookmark sync enabled and see missing or scrambled bookmarks.
  • 4 Mozillians have tried the About Sync validator and filed bugs. Keep them coming. (Email to kcambridge@mozilla.com)
• A new Sync storage server written in Go is coming soon

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/2016/11/23/these-weeks-in-firefox-issue-6/