These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 36

Highlights

• We removed XUL overlays, a legacy add-on technology. This allowed us to get rid of a bunch of old, complex code.
• We pushed a bunch of updates to the Facebook container extension: Now including Instagram and FB Messenger!
• We updated the page info security section to reflect that websites store more information than just cookies on your computer.

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    Because it’s 2018!

• Dark theme for the new tab page landed in Nightly!

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    If Batman had a browser, this would be it.

• Search engine discovery from the Address Bar landed, you can add opensearch engines from the page action menu. A few follow-ups are being worked on.

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    Because the defaults might not be what you were looking for.

• Have you seen something land recently that should have a positive performance impact for our users? Submit it in this form so we can highlight it in our Performance Updates!

Friends of the Firefox team

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

• Resolved bugs (excluding employees): https://mzl.la/2EyLwzn
  • More than one bug fixed:
    • Manish Kumar (21 bugs!)
    • Oriol Brufau [:Oriol]
    • Tim Nguyen :ntim
    • Tomislav Jovanovic :zombie
  • New contributors (🌟 = First Patch!)
    • 🌟 Jake Nixon made it so that we show the Exit shortcut helper in the App Menu on Windows
    • 🌟 kylemsguy removed some unnecessary content process Telemetry
    • 🌟 Peter Dodds fixed how the Downloads Panel displays remaining download time in the Persian locale
    • 🌟 Satish Pasupuleti [:satishp] added a WebExtension API for overriding document colours
    • 🌟 ryanro1997 fixed up some of our tests to use the common TestUtils.topicObserved mechanism rather than a hand-rolled function
    • 🌟 smswessem replaced the EmojiOne fallback emoji icon set with the MIT licensed Twemoji set

Project Updates

Add-ons

• Kris continued to remove old stuff related to legacy extensions.  Jkt got in on the action too.  Planning for the eventual removal of bootstrap.js continues.
• Assorted bugs in the webRequest (x2), pageAction, permissions (x2), downloads, devtools, and tabs (x2) APIs were fixed.
• Mossop fixed two quirks with the proxy API.
• Preloaded popups got more efficient.  They are also more readable when a dark browser theme is in use.
• Oriol optimized browser.windows.get() and browser.tabs.query() in the case there are many windows and/or many tabs.
• New APIs to set high contrast mode and the default location for new tabs were added.
• Themes can now set the hover/focused state of toolbar items and the appearance of autocomplete popups.
• When an extension uses the browser.tabs.hide() API, users can now find out about hidden tabs in the UI.  This video shows this in action.
• The groundwork has been laid for improved handling of events during browser startup.

Activity Stream

• The thumbnail service will now use tracking protection when taking screenshots.
• Wide Layout Experiment early results are in – neutral to slightly positive preference to wide layout in Beta 60!

Browser Architecture

• No more style overlays!
• Platform overlay code is being ripped out now!
• Fluent is finishing with DTD in Preferences
• mozIntl.getLocaleDisplays will land this week

Lint

• Linter hooks will now run on the entire tree if you change a configuration file
• Dan Banner enabled ESLint on osfile.jsm, nsURLFormatter.js and nsHelperAppDlg.js
• Enabling ESLint for more files in devtools so that we can get better coverage (note: some rules still disabled for those enabled directories).

Policy Engine

• Finished work on policies for 60: 45 from the MVP, and 14 extras! Everything targeted for 60 has been uplifted to beta.
• Tweaked names and arguments for some policies.
• We got our first request for a policy from someone in the wild!

Performance

• Tab warming
  • Fixed a scrolling / checkerboarding glitch that some users were experiencing with warming enabled
• Paint blank window on start-up
  • florian has a potential fix for the black area some Windows users are seeing on start-up
  • No more duplicated window when starting Firefox with a file or url provided on the command line
• dthayer is very close to moving ContentPrefService init off of the main thread. Bashing through shutdown leaks in automation.
• Gijs got rid of some sync IPC we were sending on every keypress when using the Findbar! 🎆🎉
• Gijs is also still working on making the blocklist more async. Hope to be at 100% async by the next meeting.
• felipe is joining us! Going to start focusing on content process performance
• PSA: Are you familiar with arewesmoothyet.com? If you care about reducing hangs, you should check it out!
  • In-progress dashboard for Background Hang Reporter (BHR) data. BHR collects a single stack from our Nightly population every time a hang is experienced by main threads, and sent along with Telemetry.
  • Check out these graphs
  • Also profiler-like breakdown of hangs
  • We’ve also started to break the graphs down into various components
    • Examples:
      • DevTools hangs
      • Activity Stream hangs
    • Want to track your component? File an issue here!

Privacy/Security

• Chris Kerschbaumer added an assertion that new about:pages have a CSP.
• Aakanksha fixed the “Remove Selected” button behavior when sorting sites in the Site Data Manager.
• Prathiksha moved 1000 lines of gIdentityHandler out of browser.js into their own file.
• We’re happily removing more usage of unsafeInnerHTML and innerHTML in Firefox.
  • Metabug

Search and Navigation

Address Bar & Search

• Address bar results composition for new (created from 57 on) profiles has been fixed across all the versions. “New” profiles get a unified urlbar and search suggestions first. Older or customized profiles won’t be changed.

Places

• Fixed a case where the browser picked a wrongly sized icon on popular websites, causing a blurry favicon on hi-dpi screens
• Fixed a regression in opening bookmarks from the sidebar using the keyboard
• Masayuki fixed a regression of tags autocompletion in the edit bookmarks dialog
• First part (out of 3) of the bookmark tags refactoring landed; tag queries are now using a new format that is independent from how tags are stored. Now breaking down the tagging API rewrite.
• Fixed a bug where changing the url of a place: query didn’t update its contents
• More synchronous code removals:
  • Bookmarks::getBookmarkURI
  • unnecessary annotation lookups when opening a Places context menu and removed Annotations::GetPageAnnotationNames
  • Annotations::copyPage/ItemAnnotations
• Code maintainability improvements:
  • Improved the Places drag&drop / copy&paste code
  • A few files in the browser/components/places/ folder have been renamed or removed

Sync / Firefox Accounts

• Kit, Thom, and Mark putting the finishing touches on the new bookmarks engine. ✨
  • There’s a draft of a blog post that you can review!
• Ed is putting the finishing touches on FxA Messages (formerly Pushbox 🖐📦), a service for delivering large push payloads to Firefox.
  • This will be used for New Send Tab.
• Thom is reworking how Sync backfills history records, reworked the bookmarks engine to transparently switch between the new and old engines after flipping the `services.sync.engine.bookmarks.buffer` pref, dug into profiling the new engine, and fixed more tests. 🐞
• Mark optimized observer notifications in history sync. 👀

Web Payments

• Milestone 1 completed!
• Milestone 2 is mainly focused on address/credit card add/edit screens that show in the PaymentRequest dialog
• Team has completed 49% of the Milestone 3 commitment.