Necko Team – Weekly Status Meeting Notes

Date: 2026-06-09
Edition: June
Facilitator: Greg
Next on Triage: Randell Jesup (calendar sync issue fixed)
Quality Report Coordinators (June): Valentin Gosu / Sunil Mayya

Round Table

Water Cooler Sessions

Monday and Thursday water cooler sessions continue to see good participation, with 3–4 attendees per session.
Team members reported the sessions are providing useful opportunities for collaboration and problem solving across projects..

HTTP Cache Encryption

Enterprise demand deployments, is driving prioritization of HTTP cache encryption work.
Disabling cache is not considered an acceptable user experience.
Valentin will lead planning and coordination.
Current estimate:
- Approximately two weeks of engineering effort.
- Targeting Firefox 154–155 timeframe.
Fetch-related work will be deprioritized while planning proceeds.

Performance Wins: Upload Throughput

Oskar presented finalized upload performance results.
Large file uploads (10 MB+) show up to 30% throughput improvement.
Combined with earlier work, year-to-date upload throughput gains are estimated at roughly 60–90%.
Team plans to:
- Share results in #performance-wins.
- Potentially publish a blog post.
- Include results in SecPrivNecko presentations.

Happy Eyeballs v3 Results

Initial telemetry shows approximately a 10% increase in HTTP/3 page loads for DoH users after Nightly rollout.
Desktop metrics have not yet fully reflected expected gains.
Team agreed to continue monitoring telemetry before drawing conclusions.
Follow-up investigation continues into DNS and HTTPS RR interactions.

HTTPS RR Advocacy and Tooling

Max discussed:
- HTTPS RR advocacy efforts.
- Saferoundtrip.com tooling.
- Potential conference and community outreach opportunities.
Plan to share tooling during SecPrivNecko updates.

Intermittent Failures and Claude Analysis

Randell reported substantial progress using Claude-based analysis workflows.
Results:
- Roughly half of the top 25 intermittent failures now have fixes landed or under review.
- Networking crash volume on dashboards reduced by over 95%.
Team discussed:
- Claude sandbox workflows.
- Benefits and limitations of AI-generated diagnoses.
- Need to validate suggested root causes carefully due to occasional hallucinations.

Instagram / HTTP/3 Issue

New Instagram image-loading issue under investigation.
Appears related to HTTP/3 connectivity.
Team is gathering Wireshark captures and telemetry.
Escalation will depend on additional reports.

Team Check-ins

Valentin

Leading:
- HTTP cache encryption planning.
- Triage.
Working on:
- Optional encryption for on-disk cache (Bug 2045754).
- Priority queue items.

Sunil

Continuing:
- Speculation Rules implementation.
- Local Network Access rollout.
Action item:
- Fix Happy Eyeballs / LNA interaction issue discussed during water cooler sessions.

Kershaw

Investigating:
- Instagram image-loading bug.
- ECH and HTTPS RR issues.
- Happy Eyeballs follow-up fixes.
Reviewing Max’s recent Happy Eyeballs patches.

Max

Continuing work on:
- Happy Eyeballs implementation.
- HTTPS RR and DNS investigations.
- IPv6-only connectivity support.
- Fireflare benchmarking.
Exploring IETF-level discussion around HTTPS RR and CNAME-chain handling.

Randell

Continued intermittent-failure investigations using Claude.
Landed fixes for node server crashes.
Following up on:
- Nameless cookie decisions.
- Compression dictionary error spikes.
- Review throughput for intermittent-failure patches.

Oskar

Presented:
- Upload throughput performance wins.
- SEARCH / HyStart++ experiment results.
Planning:
- Beta experimentation.
- Additional telemetry.
- Performance communication efforts.

Important Business

Priority Queue

Active Projects

FEISTY

Riding Firefox 153 trains.
Alerting probes remain outstanding.
Essential-domain categorization updates completed.
Monitoring dashboard improvements continue.

DoH Enablement

Fenix rollout continues.
RetryTRR and connection-state validation remain key focus areas.
No major roadmap changes this week.

Compression Dictionary Transport

Continuing stabilization and monitoring.
Team investigating spikes in Google-related error reports.

Local Network Access

Desktop rollout increased to 10%.
Android rollout moved to Firefox 153.
Additional prompt-behavior improvements planned.

WebTransport / Interop 2026

Ongoing implementation work.
Incremental landing strategy remains in place.
Interop testing continues.

QUIC / SEARCH / HyStart++

Nightly experiment completed.
Findings:
- No observed breakage.
- SEARCH appears to outperform HyStart++.
- Upload throughput gains confirmed.
Next steps:
- Beta experiment.
- Additional telemetry to understand early loss exits.

Happy Eyeballs

Enabled in Nightly.
Follow-up work includes:
- ECH retry handling.
- Timing metrics.
- Client certificate coordination.
- Transaction handoff improvements.