These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 34

Highlights

• Help us eliminate annoying in-content popups by installing this add-on and reporting when pages display an in-content popup like this:

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    These things are the worst. Help us get them out of your way.

• Tab warming has (finally!) been enabled on Nightly
  • This should help with perceived tab switching performance. Here’s a blog post describing how it works.
  • See any issues with it? Please file bugs and mark them blocking this bug
• For enterprise folks on Windows, there’s a new policy engine, with templates to set policies through Group Policy. We got a shout-out on gHacks.

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    If you’re a Windows system administrator, this is probably a welcome sight.

• Activity Stream has a new section context menu to remove, collapse, and reorder sections.

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    Move, remove, and collapse to your hearts content.

• We disabled all Device Sensor APIs except device orientation.
• Check out this technical blog post on Firefox Themer from Les Orchard

Friends of the Firefox team

(Give a shoutout/thanks to people for helping fix and test bugs. Introductions)

• Introductions
  • :Prathiksha got her Level 3 contributor access last week!
  • Mike Kaply is joining our team!
• Resolved bugs (excluding employees): https://mzl.la/2DlmYcH
  • More than one bug fixed:
    • :prathiksha
    • Dhi Aurrahman
    • Tim Nguyen :ntim
    • :jonathanGB
  • New contributors (🌟 = First Patch!)
    • 🌟 Adam Kasztenny got rid of a bunch of dead code from the old about:newtab page
    • 🌟 Amy switched some tests from using a hand-rolled promiseTopicObserved to using TestUtils.topicObserved
    • 🌟 Aleksandr got rid of some dead code in the browser/modules directory
    • Arthur Deschamps made sure that we send the user to about:privatebrowsing in private browsing windows at the right times
    • 🌟 Omar got rid of the unused gBrowser.tabContextMenu property
    • 🌟 Raymond converted some hardcoded colours in about:addons to CSS variables instead
    • Daniel Marshall (:starsandspirals) renamed the “profileStorage” Form Auto-fill singleton to “formAutofillStorage” to make its purpose more clear
    • 🌟 gregorywlodarek changed the label for a button in about:preferences so that it makes more sense
    • 🌟 kanika16047 switched a test from using a hand-rolled promiseWaitForCondition to using TestUtils.waitForCondition instead
    • 🌟 Michael Webster added support for showing download progress in the taskbar on Linux Mint
    • 🌟 Olivier Tilloy updated how we detect and set Firefox as the default browser on Linux when installed as a Snap package
    • 🌟 Videet Singhai removed the unused MEMORY_HEAP_COMMITTED_UNUSED Telemetry probe

Project Updates

Add-ons

• Including an embedded experiment in a WebExtension no longer breaks browserAction (uplifted to 59).
• Tab hiding shutdown now happens even if the API is unused, removing the possibility of hidden tabs staying erroneously hidden (fixed in 60).
• tabs.query() returns highlighted tabs when querying… highlighted tabs (fixed in 60).
• Dev tools panel drop downs expand as they should (fixed in 60).
• Async proxy.onRequest API (fixed in 60).
• …and DNS resolve API added (also in 60).
• Improved information on where errors triggered by async APIs came from (in 60).
• Fixed an issue where extension sidebars reload unnecessarily (fixed in 60).
• Some security bugs got fixed in Firefox 60 as well.
• Theming:
  • You can now set the active tab line color (in 60).
  • You can now change the background color of the selected tab (in 60).
  • Narrowly avoided releasing tab_background_text misnamed which would’ve been bad for migrations of Chrome extensions (uplifted to 59)

Activity Stream

• Various fixes for bookmarks and snippets
• Dashboard for Activity Stream Metrics Summary, Search, and User Preferences
• Project to move Activity Stream settings to about:preferences will be landed in 61 rather than 60

Browser Architecture

• Only 5 XUL overlays left!
• XUL menu replacement planning.
• Working out naming for custom elements in chrome.

Mobile

• Landed a sequence of patches to add improve keyboard behaviours for iPad users with Bluetooth keyboards.
• Lots of improvements around tab switching, and tab navigation.
• Lots of improvements in AwesomeBar usability.

Policy Engine

• Marketing push for Firefox Quantum for ESR (aka Firefox 60) starting soon, which will be talking about this feature
• YUKI “Piro” (from Tree Style Tabs) contributing to Policy Engine, which is great! Thank you!

Performance

• Have you seen a bugfix land that’ll likely impact Firefox performance in a positive way? Help me let the world know!
• mconley is getting rid of some sync reflows
• dthayer is moving ContentPrefService database queries off of the main thread
• dthayer also landed some probes to help shed more light on where tab switch spinners are coming from (they’re likely from bugs in the async tab switcher!)
• Gijs got rid of some unneeded code from the old about:newtab page that was running during start-up
• Gijs is also making us way lazier at getting and parsing the blocklist, which should help reduce the amount of stuff we’re doing at start-up
• florian is working on making our performance tests more comprehensive and easier to write

Privacy/Security

• We are deprecating and removing the proprietary storage option for indexedDB.open() to get rid of the “indexedDB” permission mess.
  • Intent to unship
  • Firefox Site Compatibility note
• We’re starting a quest to rid Firefox code of innerHTML and as a priority unsafeSetInnerHTML.
• Tim added permission prompts for Web Authentication direct attestation (in which websites are asking for the non-anonymized token certificate).

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    Web Authentication is great. So is your privacy.

• Chris Kerschbaumer changed the way chrome and about pages can communicate, starting with about:privatebrowsing.

Search and Navigation

Address Bar & Search

• New switch-to-tab behavior for the autofill match was confusing users, now we will instead provide both the autofill match and a switch-to-tab one. This will be uplifted to Firefox 60.
• Landed a telemetry probe to better understand how users cycle through address bar matches with the keyboard
• A last minute backout happened for Firefox 59. The original scope was to put search suggestions first for new Quantum profiles with a unified urlbar, but it ended up applying to any unified urlbar profile. We’re sorry about that and will do a post-mortem analysis of this mistake. A better fix is being worked on for Firefox 60. Note that there’s a Shield Study that could end up doing the same change, you can verify if you’re involved in about:studies.

Places

• Fixed some regressions:
  • the bookmarks dialog didn’t save keywords anymore
  • Misbehaving Drag&Drop in menu views
  • open bookmarks in a new tab from the sidebar was broken
• It’s no more possible to create third-party roots in Places. We’ll shortly remove anything that is not part of one of the official roots (menu, toolbar, unsorted, tags, mobile)
• Updated the Favicons for the default bookmarks
• Controller.js is now a lazy loaded script, rather than being loaded on each window opening. Additionally Bdahl is removing placesOverlay.xul!
• Bookmark tags autocomplete should not assert/crash anymore in debug builds

More

• Our Sqlite implementation now uses unique temporary file names (prefixed with “mz_”), to avoid confusing our temporary files I/O with other running apps
• Thom landed a patch to reuse transaction timeout timers in Sqlite.jsm ⏰.
• Kit changed Places to use immediate transactions by default. This fixes a storage thread hang with a cloned Places connection in the new bookmarks mirror.

Sync / Firefox Accounts

• Ed has a proposal for a way to detect copied and moved profiles 🚚.
• Ed is working on a client for Pushbox, a new service to store and fetch push payloads for the new “Send Tab” 📦, and made sure we hide all UI when Sync is disabled 🙈.
• Thom improved tree logging for the bookmarks mirror 🌲 and improved deduping for automatically restored bookmarks ✨.
• Mark is working on adding Web Push encryption to Firefox 🔒 and removed remaining event loop spinning from Sync 🌀.
• Kit moved more Sync metadata into Places 🗺 and optimized bookmark deduping in the mirror 📚.
• Lots of improvements to tests and core code quality from the whole team 🐞🌟.

Test Pilot

• Graduations set for 3/27 for Cliqz, Voice Fill, Snooze Tabs, Min Vid
• Firefox Themer updates:
  • Sweet new textures
  • Launch dates are still TBD
• Screenshots updates:
  • Annotations launched! You can now crop, highlight, or draw on uploaded screenshots.
    • Blog post on the way (pending legal approval)
    • Find it on the Test Pilot Medium
  • Upcoming: Firefox Accounts integration, porting the WebExtension to Chrome
  • Blog post looking at our usage data

Web Payments

• Only four remaining milestone 1 bugs!
• Fixed
  • Don’t dispatch shipping*change events if requestShipping is false
  • Implement the payerName/payerEmail/payerPhone contact picker
  • Success/failure screens
    • Implement the “failure” screen for when the merchant rejects the payment and doesn’t request retrying
    • Implement the “success” screen for when the merchant accepts the payment
  • Cleanup/chores
    • Use keydown instead of keypress to trigger display of the debugging panel
    • Forgot to call `sendMessageToContent` helper in “paymentDialogWrapper.js”
    • Document the need to have e10s enabled for Web Payments
    • Add error option to the PaymentRequest debug panel