All about Prefs

[Nicholas Nethercote]

Hi,

I recently became the module owner of Prefs, and there are several peers.
In the past it was an ill-maintained module, but that is no longer the case.

I have been doing a bunch of work to improve Prefs. As part of this I wrote
a document that describes how they currently work, and some of their
problems:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1V5Wc9bXwfgMG2JOsswvDPVwZl_xiaSBxwJXf3fiEaU8/

I am working on a redesign that will fix a lot of the problems. There was a
meeting about this in Austin. I hope to implement this in Q1 2018.

By chance, I just discovered that a new DOMPreferences class has been
created in bug 1419771.
As far as I can tell, it was created and reviewed by DOM peers without any
input from Prefs peers. Although the changes are all within dom/, it was
still an unpleasant surprise, because this is an additional thing I'm going
to have to deal with in my redesign, on top of the existing gfxPrefs and
MediaPrefs classes.

If you have changes related to Prefs, please let me (or another Prefs peer)
know about it. Thanks.

Nick
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Intent to remove Ambient Light and Proximity sensor APIs

[Jonathan Kingston]

I am suggesting the removal of both Ambient Light and Proximity Sensor APIs
via a preference so we can ensure there is no adverse impact to the web
with a quick mitigation if needed.

If there are no issues with this, I plan to push the code early in the new
year to account for the holiday downtime.

Previous attempts have been made to remove these APIs however this intent
to remove *does not* include Device Orientation which will need further
work to deprecate:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.platform/45XApRxACaM


Previous thread:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/mozilla.dev.platform/ambient$20light|sort:relevance/mozilla.dev.platform/QI2-SO-1jxY/-CrSbuH-BAAJ

The rationale:

* These APIs have various privacy leaks, including violating the
same-origin policy, without the user being informed or interaction.
* These APIs do not match the current standards for sensor APIs
* There's no interest to address these shortcomings. (Mostly in the sense
of engineering resources and having other problems to tackle first.)
* As these are event-driven APIs the compatibility impact should be minimal
to none. The events simply won't fire.

Work will be implemented here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/
show_bug.cgi?id=1359076
Thanks
Jonathan
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