According to bmo 623797, cairo's tee surface backend will be required by future version of firefox. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=623797#c8 So it's a good choice to add "--enable-tee" option to the configure script.
If Firefox requires it, we'll enable it immediately and push an upgrade. So just pinging me (here or in IRC) should be enough. Until then, I'd prefer to be careful with Cairo backends that are unsupported upstream. (I should note that I was the upstream person to default-disable it for 1.10 because we agreed it was untested and a bit buggy.) Thanks for pointing out the upstream bug, I cc'ed myself there.
According to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=624684#c2 , we need tee surface after landing https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=593733 . I'm watching bmo #624684 and bmo #593733. I'll let you know when tee surface is required by mozilla products.
bmo #593733 is fixed. We need tee surface backend for Mozilla products now.
Cairo was rebuilt with tee surface enabled already, so closing this.