Welcome to the June 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
- Calixte landed the first functionalities (writing text, drawing) to perform editing of PDFs, with some improvements contributed by Jonas.
- A new “Power Use” experimental feature has been added to the Firefox Profiler. On Apple Silicon or machines running Windows 11 on Intel CPUs, it can be enabled from about:profiling to get a very fine grained understanding of how Firefox uses power.
Contributors
- Federico Mena Quintero (federicomenaquintero)
Detailed Project Updates
Bugzilla
and Bugbug
- Suhaib implemented a feature for autonag to needinfo team managers about tracked bugs with no assignee, low severity, or low priority.
- Suhaib implemented a feature for autonag to add topcrash keywords automatically based on the top-crash identification criteria.
- Marco implemented a feature for autonag to identify teams with no team managers defined in autonag.
- Marco implemented a feature for autonag to avoid needinfoing regression authors, if they are inactive.
- Sent a survey about autonag and started working on improvements based on the learnings from the feedback.
- Tom Ritter implemented a feature for autonag to add reminder functionality to the autonag bot.
- https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/ got a gentle update, adding direct links to better locations for support, webcompat issues, and feedback.
Build System and Mach Environment
- cargo-vet is now deployed and tracking audits of our Rust dependencies.
- Alex updated the bootstrap.py script to automatically add Microsoft Defender Antivirus exclusions for all the necessary directories.
CI and Treeherder 
- Autoclassification enabled for a subset of test suites and failure types
- Eva implemented autobackfill and autoretrigger functionality
- Joel added support for running tests in CI with a conditioned profile (Bug 1769097)
- Desktop CI tasks run with fission by default, no more “-fis” and “-e10s” (Bug 1750399)
- Valentin Rigal upgraded the performance alerts table to prevent hitting the limit of alerts it can store
Crash Management
- The crash reporter dialog now suggests sending crash reports by default on Linux (it had been accidentally disabled long ago).
Fuzzing and Sanitizers
- Enabled ‘function’ UBSan check.
Lint, Static Analysis and Code Coverage
- Federico Mena Quintero improved the accessibility of grcov’s HTML report
OS Integration and Security
- VA-API hardware accelerated video decoding is now supported on Linux. It is not default-enabled yet due to lack of CI coverage.
- We now detect Windows installations where the user has broken Exploit Protection settings and disable win32k lockdown in that case.
- Enabled “-ftrivial-auto-var-init” for code in editor component. Shipped in 102.
PDF.js
- Calixte landed the first functionalities (writing text, drawing) to perform editing of PDFs, with some improvements contributed by Jonas
- Please help us test it and file bugs blocking bug 1774350
- Jonathan fixed a few longstanding and very common issues related to PDF printing (bug 1777209, bug 1774631)
- Calixte added support for rotating annotations, used commonly (e.g. in PDF forms from Deutsche Post)
- Calixte implemented outlining of required fields in PDF forms
Power use
- A new “Power Use” experimental feature has been added to the Firefox Profiler. On Apple Silicon or machines running Windows 11 on Intel CPUs, it can be enabled from about:profiling to get a very fine grained understanding of how Firefox uses power.
Release Engineering and Management
- Fx-Trains got a performance boost as well as various improvements to its home page for releases in flight, including now data for ESR.
Thanks for reading and see you next month!