These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 30

Highlights

• The next ESR will be Firefox 60, and will come with the Policy Engine to make it easier to configure mass Firefox installs in an enterprise environment.
• Firefox for the Amazon Fire TV was released!
• Prathiksha added the ability to deny permission prompts by default in about:preferences.

• We’re going to limit new platform features to only be available in secure contexts.
• <script type=”module”> has been enabled in Nightly builds.
• Users with a unified Address Bar will now receive Search Suggestions before suggestions from history and open tabs. The behavior is easily changeable through a checkbox in the Search Preferences pane.

Friends of the Firefox team

• Resolved bugs (excluding employees): https://mzl.la/2D8ML8q
  • More than one bug fixed:
    • :prathiksha
    • Aditya Bharti [:adbugger]
    • Jeremy Lempereur
    • Steve Pfister
    • Tim Nguyen :ntim
  • New contributors (🌟 = First Patch!)
    • 86ecce74 got rid of some XBL bindings we don’t need anymore. XBL graphs continue to trend in the right direction!
    • Archit Jugran got rid of some superfluous CSS from the Synced Tabs sidebar search input
    • Ashish Verma [:ashish1500616] got rid of some superfluous CSS from the translation info bar
    • 🌟 Ashwin Patil modified BHR to check Telemetry::CanRecordPrereleaseData() rather than the toolkit.telemetry.enabled preference
    • 🌟 Rohan Rajpal added an assertion to prevent Telemetry’s registerEvent from being used in the content process
    • 🌟 Steve Pfister fixed a bug where the SafeBrowsing warning notification bar wouldn’t go away after a page navigation, and made sure that the tab title was properly set in about:url-classifier

Project Updates

Add-ons

• PageActions can now be shown and/or hidden automatically for specific pages via pattern matching.
• The webRequest API now merges multiple headers with the same name rather than using only the last one.
• We landed some detailed documentation about how to implement WebExtensions APIs.
• We now redirect the current tab to the restored New Tab after disabling a New Tab extension in the doorhanger.
• Added a couple of mechanisms to the webRequest API to allow for requests to be upgraded from HTTP to HTTPS.
• The cookies API now supports FPI mode and FPI cookies.
• Several protocols were added to the whitelist of allowed protocols for custom protocol handlers.
• browserAction set* methods can now accept a null value which removes the property.
• More detail has been added to sandbox names to aid in debugging.
• A memory reporter was added to show basic information about active WebExtensions in about:memory.
• Two major changes landed for WebExtension experiments:
  • Experiments can now be bundled with an extension.
  • Experiments can now include content-side APIs.
• Exceptions raised from a webRequest blocking listener now report the original error message and filename.
• about:preferences has been updated to show when an extension is managing Tracking Protection.
• Extensions can now control cookie behaviour, specifically the prefs for network.cookie.cookieBehavior and network.cookie.lifetimePolicy.

Activity Stream

• Drag and Drop landing for Top Sites in 59
• Tippy Top icons V2, where we crawl sites for high-res SVG icons for Top Sites

Browser Architecture

• XUL Template feature has been removed (thanks Gijs)
• Metabug filed for removing XUL overlays
• XBL replacement has continued to make good progress. Expect a newsletter update soon.
  • Bindings removed since last meeting – thanks to Dão, Ian Moody, ntim, Paolo, 86ecce74, and Myk: tabbrowser-close-tab-button, toolbarbutton-image, datetimepicker-base, timepicker, datepicker, datepicker-grid, datepicker-popup, timed-textbox, addengine-icon, expander, preferences, preference, prefwindow, prefpane, panebutton, dialogheader, optionsDialog, stringbundleset.

Firefox Core Engineering

• Crash machinery:
  • The last piece of crash ping support (bringing the crash ping to Fennec) will be done within the month. Follow along here.
• Migration performance improvements:
  • Doug Thayer has landed several performance improvements to migration in 59 (as he did in 58). Too many to list, so check them out.
• Update Agent:
  • Will allow for checking for and downloading of updates async from Firefox.
  • Was originally slated for incremental release, but has been changed to release as a complete feature, targeted for 62.
  • Tracking meta bug is 1343669.
• Installer:
  • Rename of Windows shortcut (first attempted for 57) from “Mozilla Firefox” to just “Firefox” landed in beta 58. (bringing Windows in line with Mac and Linux)
• Enterprise Policies Engine:
  • Targeted for Firefox 60 (for the next ESR)
  • Win/Mac/Linux support through .json, + Windows Group Policies
  • Main bug: bug 1419102
  • Ownership of policies: each policy is owned by the team who owns that feature
  • Bug tree for policies to be implemented for first version:
  • Spreadsheet with policies and ownership

Form Autofill

• V2 features were complete and got Pre-Beta sign off (yellow)
• The edit dialog of Address Autofill in Preferences now is able to change the layout according to the selected country
• Implemented a summary in the update doorhanger to let users know which profile will be updated
• Slightly refactored the core modules for better supporting sections
• Fixed some issues of Clear Form button caused by the cache mechanism in the autocomplete module
• Fixed a few RTL issues
• Fixed a lot of website compatible issues

Lint

• Lint’s dependencies (python & node) should now be installed when running ./mach bootstrap (on Mac/Linux, Windows has them already installed for mozilla-build).

Performance

• Tab warming fixes landed on Nightly! Still not enabled by default on nightly pending more fixes, follow this bug to keep track of that.
  • mconley wrote a blog post if you’re curious about what tab warming is
  • There’s a known bug where in some cases, with warming enabled, opening a new tab results in a permanent spinner.
  • Thanks to dao for the patch that warms tabs when using the Ctrl-Tab previews feature
  • Patch to warm up the next tab when hovering close icon is waiting for review
• Patches to move FormHistory initialization off of the main thread are reviewed, and waiting until after the merge to land.
• Looking at replacing Cu.import with a WebIDL-implemented alternative
  • This will likely land on a weekend, have an eslint rule, and rewrite existing callsites.
• Over on the platform side, bholley is reducing libxul size significantly by avoiding the use of Debug symbols for release-compiled Rust (e.g. those implicated by use of {:?} in format strings for panic! calls). If you write Rust, please read the relevant dev.platform posts.

Privacy/Security

• This is the meta bug for our new project that deals with some UX and privacy issues around storage/site data/cookies (we’re also doing a user study).
• :cfu improved integrating the canvas permission (against canvas fingerprinting in anti-fingerprinting mode) into our permission system

Search and Navigation

Address Bar & Search

• window.external.addSearchEngine has been removed
• Fixed a bug causing search engines set by add-ons updated to WebExtension with the Quantum update to be wrongly reset
• Fixed a bug where the one-off buttons in the urlbar were not properly hidden or were keyboard selectable when hidden

Places

• Doug Thayer landed a patch replacing the single onVisit notification with a new grouped onVisits notification, that helps batch insertion of visits avoiding too many crossings of the XPConnect boundary
• Some progress on reliability:
  • Places will try to clone a corrupt databases into valid one on startup, allowing in most cases to keep history intact. In case of failure it fallbacks to the old method (new database with restored bookmarks).
  • Fixed a UI bug allowing to create empty-named bookmark tags
• Some progress on bookmarks full syncability:
• Places’ tree selectItem() now takes guids as well as database ids.

• PlacesUtils.isRootItem() also will take guids as well as database ids.

Web Payments

• Landed our multiline rich-select custom element that will be used for the address selector as well as the basic-card selector.