<select> dropdown update 2

Mike and I met with the “select dropdown” team today and discussed where they’re at and the work that they can focus on for the next week. We are discussing a possible “hack-weekend” October 1st and 2nd at Michigan State.

Freddy got XCode up and running and can debug processes at the single-process/multi-process fork. Jared and Miguel are having issues getting their debugger to work. Freddy will be helping Jared and Miguel with their setup to compare what is different, with the fallback being Jared and Miguel using LLDB as their debugger.

In the past week, the team has also been spending time working on presentations and project plans.

For C++ code, their initial plan was to fake the single-process to run through the multi-process code path by removing the checks for if the code is running in a content process and if a special e10s desktop preference is enabled.

As a quick technical dive: When a select dropdown is clicked, we determine that we’re running in a content process, and we fire an event (“mozshowdropdown”). A content script running in the content process listens for the “mozshowdropdown” event and opens the popup.

The plan to fake the single-process to run through the multi-process won’t work though, because the content script mentioned above won’t be loaded and thus there won’t be an event listener. The content-script is only loaded right now through the remote-browser.xml binding. The content-script would have to be loaded through the non-remote-browser binding (browser.xml) as well as the various message listeners and event listeners.

While working on this, it would be a good idea to move the code from select-child.js to browser-content.js, since we don’t really need a separate file for select items and browser-content.js is loaded in single-process Firefox.

As for styling changes, the students were able to use the Browser Toolbox to change web content through forms.css and see how things like input textboxes could get different default colors. To change the styling of a select dropdown, the students will play around in browser.css to tweak the styling. In the end they’ll want to make sure that the styling exists under the /themes directory, and likely within /themes/shared/.

One of the students asked if we had ideas about specific algorithms or design-patterns that the search-within-the-dropdown implementation should use. We pointed them at the Browser Console’s filtering ability and asked that the students follow the implementation there.

That wraps up our notes from this week’s meeting. We’ll be meeting regularly for the next 10-ish weeks as the students make progress on their work.