Engineering Effectiveness Newsletter (April 2022 Edition)

Welcome to the April edition of the Engineering Effectiveness Newsletter! The Engineering Effectiveness org makes it easy to develop, test and release Mozilla software at scale. See below for some highlights, then read on for more detailed info!

Highlights

  • Simplified tracking of intermittent bugs beta period is complete and we didn’t encounter any hiccups. We will start rolling it out more rapidly in May.
  • Win32k Lockdown is running as an experiment on release and will be gradually rolled out during the Firefox 100 cycle (for Windows 10 Fall Creators Update & later).
    • In parallel, the Windows Spotlight work has kicked off and we started landing quality improvements and bug fixes for long-standing annoyances.
  • pdf.js is now using OffscreenCanvas for improved performance and memory use.
  • We now have Glean probes reporting CPU use. These new sources of data will help prioritize efforts to reduce Firefox power consumption.
  • Engineering Effectiveness is hiring! If you know of anyone who could be interested in working on CI and Automation or on Windows Integration, please let us know!

Contributors

  • Devon Burriss (dburriss)
  • manisha27

Detailed Project Updates

Bugzilla and Bugbug

Build System and Mach Environment

CI and Treeherder

Crash Management

Fuzzing and Sanitizers

  • Tyson and Jesse are scaling up fuzzing on Android. Fuzzers are targeting geckoview_example via Grizzly.
  • Automatic platform specific test case reduction via Grizzly is up and running.
  • Implemented a TC hook for monitoring fuzzing prefs that are blocked by open bugs.
  • Reduced WebGL value generation failures by >50% which have a significant impact on coverage depth.
  • In an effort to support Thunderbird’s security and stability, we have helped them to get something like the ASan Nightly Project to work with Thunderbird.

Lint, Static Analysis and Code Coverage

OS Integration and Security

  • We shipped X11 connection removal to release in Firefox 99, closing a sandboxing escape on older distros.
  • Win32k Lockdown is running as an experiment on release and will be gradually rolled out during the Firefox 100 cycle (for Windows 10 Fall Creators Update & later).
  • The Windows Spotlight work has kicked off and we started landing quality improvements and bugfixes for long-standing annoyances.
  • Utility Process work has progressed to a point where audio decoding can be enabled by flipping the prefs in Nightly: media.utility-process.enabled.
  • We now hide your cursor on Windows when you start typing. This can be toggled with widget.windows.hide_cursor_when_typing.

PDF.js

  • Calixte implemented usage of OffscreenCanvas in the pdf.js main thread and in the worker
    • It helps drawing some images in the worker instead of the main thread
    • Overall improving performance and memory use
  • Calixte added a cache for mask images. The pdf from bug 857031 is drawing way faster now.

Power use

Release Engineering and Management

  • Gabriel added debsign support to the taskcluster signing worker. Signing tasks can now sign debian packages using autograph.

Other

Thanks for reading and see you next month!