Necko Newsletter #4 - 2023 H1 Recap

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Jun 30, 2023, 11:08:23 AM6/30/23

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Dylan O'Toole joined recently as a Networking Intern based in Canada
Randall Jesup joined the Necko Team temporarily to help out with WebTransport
In May we had a workweek in Berlin to collaborate with the wider Sec-Privacy-Necko group and align upcoming projects and work on HTTPS adoption, storage, cookies, speculative connect, pre-connect and performance (and more!).
We have an opening on the team for a Senior Staff Software Engineer

We appreciate all new contributors working on Good first bugs in the networking component since our last Newsletter:

And also longer time contributors:

One contribution from the Tor project was on Necko:

Pier Angelo Vendrame with D170373 - Add a seed to the network ID, this helps to prevent linkability of users in the same network.

WebTransport released in Fx114 on 2023-06-06
DoH Settings UI improvements released in Fx114 on 2023-06-06
Early Hints has been enabled in Nightly and Beta in Fx111 on 2023-01-19. Experiments in Beta show that there are still some performance investigations necessary before confidentially shipping it.
URL interop 2023 is under way to improve our web platform test results.
The Off-Main-Thread project is in the early stages as we decide its scope.
Expanding Mochitest with Http2/3 support is wrapping up and will help prevent future issues similar to FoxStuck by increasing code coverage of HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 code in more realistic scenarios.
Speculative Connections:

We identified problems in our speculative connection code paths. These have since been fixed - https connections, rel=preconnect - leading to measured performance improvements.
Improved tests have landed with more underway.
An experiment is scheduled to optimize the number of sockets available for speculative connections.

Oblivious DNS over HTTP (ODoH) has been superseded by DNS over Oblivious HTTP (DoOH).
DNS over Oblivious HTTP (DoOH) experiment has completed, identifying OHTTP proxies have negligible impact on page load performance opening the opportunity to further explore and identify uses for OHTTP.
DoH warnings experiments are running evaluating the impact of informing users when 3rd parties actively prevent DoH (blocking, network canary signal).
The cookie module now has new owners and peers.

We fixed a very old bug in our HTTP/2 Upload codepath which restricted performance on faster networks.
Andrew Creskey exposed internal necko timings to PerfStats so that they can be measured within our performance test infrastructure. These are also visible from telemetry on this dashboard
Necko team adapted priority queue system with bugs that the team looks at next
The Necko Story is now available in the Wiki - an interesting read about the background around Necko.
We are working on improving our documentation in the wiki and on firefox-source-docs.
We are experimenting with novel ways of knowledge sharing through Decipher Necko information sessions.