45.5.1 chemspill imminent

The plan was to get you a test build of TenFourFox 45.6.0 this weekend, but instead you're going to get a chemspill for 45.5.1 to fix an urgent 0-day exploit in Firefox which is already in the wild. Interestingly, the attack method is very similar to the one the FBI infamously used to deanonymise Tor users in 2013, which is a reminder that any backdoor the "good guys" can sneak through, the "bad guys" can too.

TenFourFox is technically vulnerable to the flaw, but the current implementation is x86-based and tries to attack a Windows DLL, so as written it will merely crash our PowerPC systems. In fact, without giving anything away about the underlying problem, our hybrid-endian JavaScript engine actually reduces our exposure surface further because even a PowerPC-specific exploit would require substantial modification to compromise TenFourFox in the same way. That said, we will still implement the temporary safety fix as well. The bug is a very old one, going back to at least Firefox 4.

Meanwhile, 45.6 is going to be scaled back a little. I was able to remove telemetry from the entire browser (along with its dependencies), and it certainly was snappier in some sections, but required wholesale changes to just about everything to dig it out and this is going to hurt keeping up with the ESR repository. Changes this extensive are also very likely to introduce subtle bugs. (A reminder that telemetry is disabled in TenFourFox, so your data is never transmitted, but it does accumulate internal counters and while it is rarely on a hot codepath there is still non-zero overhead having it around.) I still want to do this but probably after feature parity, so 45.6 has a smaller change where telemetry is instead only removed from user-facing chrome JavaScript. This doesn't help as much but it's a much less invasive change while we're still on source parity with 45ESR.

Also, tests with the "non-volatile" part of IonPower-NVLE showed that switching to all, or mostly, non-volatile registers in the JavaScript JIT compiler had no obvious impact on most benchmarks and occasionally was a small negative. Even changing the register allocator to simply favour non-volatile registers, without removing volatiles, had some small regressions. As it turns out, Ion actually looks pretty efficient with saving volatile registers prior to calls after all and the overhead of having to save non-volatile registers upon entry apparently overwhelms any tiny benefit of using them. However, as a holdover from my plans for NVLE, we've been saving three more non-volatile general purpose registers than we allow the allocator to use; since we're paying the overhead to use them already, I added those unused registers to the allocator and this got us around 1-2% benefit with no regression. That will ship with 45.6 and that's going to be the extent of the NVLE project.

On the plus side, however, 45.6 does have HiDPI support completely removed (because no 10.6-compatible system has a retina display, let alone any Power Mac), which makes the widget code substantially simpler in some sections, and has a couple other minor performance improvements, mostly to scrolling on image-heavy pages, and interface fixes. I also have primitive performance sampling working, which is useful because of a JavaScript interpreter infinite loop I discovered on a couple sites in the wild (and may be the cause of the over-recursion problems I've seen other places). Although it's likely Mozilla's bug and our JIT is not currently implicated, it's probably an endian issue since it doesn't occur on any Tier-1 platform; fortunately, the rough sampler I threw together was successfully able to get a sensible callstack that pointed to the actual problem, proving its functionality. We've been shipping this bug since at least TenFourFox 38, so if I don't have a fix in time it won't hold the release, but I want to resolve it as soon as possible to see if it fixes anything else. I'll talk about my adventures with the mysterious NSSampler in a future post soonish.

Watch for 45.5.1 over the weekend, and 45.6 beta probably next week.