The Bugs Blocking In-Content Prefs, part 2

At the beginning of November I published a blog post with the list of bugs that are blocking in-content prefs from shipping. Since that post, quite a few bugs have been fixed and we figured out an approach for fixing most of the high-contrast bugs.

As in the last post, bugs that should be easy to fix for a newcomer are highlighted in yellow.

Here is the new list of bugs that are blocking the release:

• High Contrast mode
  • Bug 1022582: Checkboxes and radio buttons in about:preferences lack any indication they’re checked/selected when using High Contrast mode
• Session restore
  • Bug 1025719: openPreferences(panelName) doesn’t open the requested pane if about:preferences is in a yet-to-be-loaded tab
  • Bug 1034296: Action dropdown in Application pane does not open when session restored
• Subdialogs
  • Bug 1043346: InContent Prefs – Dialogs should have their dimensions reset after closing
  • Bug 1043612: Persist the size of resizable in-content subdialogs
  • Bug 1044597: in-content preferences: resized dialogs should not push buttons into overflow
  • Bug 1044600: in-content preferences: empty dialogs after pressing backspace or the Back button
  • Bug 1055973: Navigating by TAB key, it should be only in between the browser UI and the sub-dialog
  • Bug 1056478: Resizer of sub-dialog follows only half of the movement of mouse pointer
• UX
  • Bug 1008171: No focus for elements except textboxes (and buttons, on Windows and Linux) inside in-content preferences
  • Bug 1008172: Scrolling up and down on pages with scrollbars in about:preferences will change subgroups
  • Bug 1014208: Updated InContent Preferences Design Based on Project Chameleon
  • Bug 1036434: In-content preferences doesn’t show the complete scrollbar
• Miscellaneous
  • Bug 1012223: in-content preferences loading slowly
  • Bug 1037225: Consider keeping browser.preferences.instantApply = false on Windows
  • Bug 1047586: Unable to interact with In-content preferences after changing Font size

The list is now down to 16 bugs (from 20). In the meantime, the following bugs have been fixed:

• Bug 1022578: Can’t tell what category is selected in about:preferences when using High Contrast mode
• Bug 1022579: Help buttons in about:preferences have no icon when using High Contrast mode
• Bug 1012410: Can’t close in-content cookie exceptions dialog
• Bug 1089812: Implement updated In-content pref secondary dialogs

Big thanks goes out to Richard Marti and Tim Nguyen for fixing the above mentioned bugs as well as their continued focus on helping to bring the In-Content Preferences to to the Beta and Release channels.

The Bugs Blocking In-Content Prefs

If you’ve been following my blog, you know that there has been a long on-going project to rewrite Firefox’ preferences and move them to a page within the browser.

Work has continued on that front, but it has been moving at a slow pace. Today, representatives from engineering, user experience, and project management met together to form the remaining list of bugs that are blocking us from shipping in-content preferences to the Release channel.

In total, we have 20 bugs blocking the release. There are five different categories that the bugs fit in. Bugs that should be easy to pick up and finish for a new-comer are highlighted.

• High-contrast mode
  • Bug 1022578: Can’t tell what category is selected in about:preferences when using High Contrast mode
  • Bug 1022579: Help buttons in about:preferences have no icon when using High Contrast mode
  • Bug 1022582: Checkboxes and radio buttons in about:preferences lack any indication they’re checked/selected when using High Contrast mode
• Session restore
  • Bug 1025719: openPreferences(panelName) doesn’t open the requested pane if about:preferences is in a yet-to-be-loaded tab
  • Bug 1034296: Action dropdown in Application pane does not open when session restored
• Subdialogs
  • Bug 1056478: Resizer of sub-dialog follows only half of the movement of mouse pointer
  • Bug 1055973: Navigating by TAB key, it should be only in between the browser UI and the sub-dialog
  • Bug 1044600: in-content preferences: empty dialogs after pressing backspace or the Back button
  • Bug 1044597: in-content preferences: resized dialogs should not push buttons into overflow
  • Bug 1043346: in-content subdialog cut off on bottom and right. Unrelated subdialog size changing affect the other one.
  • Bug 1043612: Persist the size of resizable in-content subdialogs
  • Bug 1012410: Can’t close in-content cookie exceptions dialog
• UX
  • Bug 1089812: Implement updated In-content pref secondary dialogs
  • Bug 1014208: Updated InContent Preferences Design Based on Project Chameleon
  • Bug 1036434: In-content preferences doesn’t show the complete scrollbar
  • Bug 1008171: No focus for elements except textboxes (and buttons, on Windows and Linux) inside in-content preferences
  • Bug 1008172: Scrolling up and down on pages with scrollbars in about:preferences will change subgroups
• Miscellaneous
  • Bug 1012223: in-content preferences loading slowly
  • Bug 1037225: Consider keeping browser.preferences.instantApply = false on Windows
  • Bug 1047586: Unable to interact with In-content preferences after changing Font size

If you’d like to work on one of the above bugs, please click on the bug and read the details. If you have any questions, please post the question in the bug and someone will get back to you. Thanks!

New in Firefox Nightly: In-content Preferences

I’m happy to announce that starting today, the new in-content preferences are enabled by default in Firefox Nightly.

This project was started by a group of students at Michigan State University and was mentored by Blair McBride and myself. Since its start, it has continued to get a ton of attention from contributors world-wide.

This is a list of people who have contributed patches to the in-content preferences as of this posting:

• Ally Naaktgeboren
• Andres Hernandez
• Andrew Hurle
• Benjamin Peterson
• Benjamin Smedberg
• Brendan Dahl
• Brian R. Bondy
• Brian Smith
• Carsten “Tomcat” Book
• Chris Mahoney
• Chris Peterson
• Christian Ascheberg
• Christian Sonne
• Devan Sayles
• Dão Gottwald
• Ed Morley
• Ehsan Akhgari
• Florian Quèze
• Gervase Markham
• Gijs Kruitbosch
• Gregory Szorc
• Honza Bambas
• Jan de Mooij
• Jan Varga
• Jared Wein
• Javi Rueda
• Jeff Walden
• John Schoenick
• Jon Rietveld
• Jonathan Mayer

• Josh Matthews
• JosiahOne
• Kyle Machulis
• Mahdi Dibaiee
• Manish Goregaokar
• Manish Goregaokar
• Mark Hammond
• Martin Stransky
• Matthew Noorenberghe
• Michael Harrison
• Mike Connor
• Mike Hommey
• Ms2ger
• Nicholas Nethercote
• Nick Alexander
• Owen Carpenter
• Paolo Amadini
• Phil Ringnalda
• Richard Marti
• Richard Newman
• rsx11m
• Ryan VanderMeulen
• Sebastian Hengst
• Sid Stamm
• Ted Mielczarek
• Theo Chevalier
• Tim Taubert
• Yosy
• Zuhao (Joe) Chen

There is still a lot of work to be done before shipping the new in-content preferences out to people on the release builds of Firefox. That also means that this long list of contributors doesn’t have to stay at 59 people, it can keep growing 🙂

We have a list of bugs that we need to fix before we can call version 1 of this project complete. The easiest way for someone new to help out is to download Firefox Nightly and help test that the new preferences work just as well as the old preferences. If you find an issue and see that it hasn’t already been reported, please file a new bug in Bugzilla and leave a comment on this blog post with a link to the bug that you filed.

In-content preferences are now available in Firefox Nightly

Starting today, users can access in-content preferences in Firefox Nightly.

First, a big congratulations to Zuhao (Joe) Chen, Jon Rietveld, Owen Carpenter, and Devan Sayles. The four students from Michigan State University worked through their spring semester to bring in-content preferences to Firefox.

At the end of the semester, the students presented their work in front of a panel of judges. The judges evaluated their project alongside 11 projects from other software organizations. At the end of the day, the students learnt that they had won the award for the best overall Design Day performance, the Auto-Owners Exposition Award. Congratulations on reaching this point of the project, as well as all graduating college!

The students can be seen in the picture on the top-right of this post, as they receive their award from Scott Lake of Auto-Owners Insurance (left-most in the picture).

In the 16 weeks of the semester, the students got comfortable with Mercurial, Bugzilla, IRC, Google+ hangouts, crazy timezone differences (I’m 3 hours behind, and Blair is 16 hours ahead of the students), Mochitest automated tests, code reviews, and much more. The students also got really great experience with writing localization-friendly CSS, HTML5 JavaScript APIs, special JavaScript language features that haven’t made it to other browsers yet, and even more.

See the table below for the changesets that have already landed on mozilla-central:

Changeset	Commit message
8b195889f55c	Zuhao (Joe) Chen — Bug 731866 – Copy and port current preference tests to run against the in-content preferences. r=jaws
9b4f86c85565	Devan Sayles — Bug 735471 – Add a pref to switch between window’d preferences and in-content preferences. r=jaws,bmcbride
0fbf6059c293	Jon Rietveld — Bug 737177 – Port the security pane to the in-content preferences implementation. r=bmcbride
29de131322c5	Devan Sayles — Bug 735091 – Sync pane for in-content prefrences. r=jaws,bmcbride
4953a39c52e6	Devan Sayles — Bug 732125 – Content pane for in-content preferences. r=jaws,bmcbride
bb179b7cf722	Jon Rietveld — Bug 733469 – Move the applications preferences to in-content UI. r=jaws r=bmcbride
68e7c139e580	Jon Rietveld — Bug 723737 – Move the advanced preferences to in-content UI. r=jaws r=bmcbride
d849b7493ea2	Jon Rietveld — Bug 723328 – Move the privacy preferences to in-content UI. r=bmcbride
c14a9f3448da	Owen Carpenter — Bug 719717 – Move the tabs preferences to in-content UI. r=bmcbride
c9262b622112	Jon Rietveld — Bug 724686 – General pane for in-content preferences. r=bmcbride
4d02fc5fc5c3	Owen Carpenter — Bug 734013 – Implement the pane-switching functionality for the in-content preferences. r=bmcbride
b2d23fc61c6f	Jon Rietveld — Bug 735557 – Add about:preferences to the inContentWhitelist. r=bmcbride
f1148c7cd5e3	Jon Rietveld — Bug 733473 – Implement initial prerequisites for in-content preferences, and landing page. r=bmcbride

There’s still more work to do before we enable these new preferences by default. We need to make navigating them a little easier as well as make them a little prettier, but progress is being made 🙂

Here’s the current list of the bugs that still need to be finished:

• 738797: Enable the in-content preferences by default
• 740213: cursor pointer not shown when mouse is over link (in-content preferences)
• 741047: Implement opening in-content preferences to a given view
• 744936: Security review for In-content preferences
• 752719: Interaction redesign for in-content Preferences
• 753673: In-content preferences and Add-on manager not navigable anymore after cleaning history
• 754120: unable to dismiss modal dialog for saved passwords from in-content preferences

To test out the new in-content preferences, go to about:config and enable the browser.preferences.inContent preference.

MSU CSE Capstone update 4/6

It is the end of the thirteenth week of the project to move the preferences to in-content UI. There are approximately two weeks left to get the project done.

Status update

Joe and Jon spent a lot of time this week getting the current unit tests copied to exercise the new in-content preferences. Jon did a push to the tryserver with all of the patches and there are try builds available for you to download and play with.

Owen and Devan have been continuing on the preference categories and the about:config preferences for enabling the feature.

The students are also working on an overview video of their work this semester.

Next steps

The next steps are to get the new changes pushed to the UX branch and fix the last remaining nits.