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

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/