Categories: News

These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 43

Highlights

  • Today is the last day for Outreachy interns and GSoC students. Thank you for all your contributions! 🎉
  • The Tracking Protection UI has been replaced with our new “Content Blocking” UI (almost) everywhere (Metabug). You can check it out in Nightly right now.
    • Showing the Content Blocking controls inside about:preferences.

      Shiny new controls for Content Blocking in about:preferences!

    • Showing the Identity Panel's new Content Blocking indicator and controls.

      The Identity Panel has been beefed up with Content Blocking powers too.

  • A new special kind of Topsites: Search Topsites. They emphasize to the user the option to search directly from the location bar with different search providers. Based on browser locale, relevant search providers will be pinned in the topsites area. There is also an option to add more search providers or remove them.
    • Showing the new default search engines in the Top Sites in Activity Stream

      Save yourself a step, and search directly from the address bar! Clicking these Top Sites will show you how.

    • Clicking on a search topsite will pre-fill the location bar with the provider keyword and you can start searching!
      • Showing that you can search from the address bar using @amazon

        Typing @amazon followed by your search query is much faster than typing amazon.com, waiting for the page to load, and then starting your search.

  • Tab warming has been enabled by default on macOS, and is scheduled to ride the trains in Firefox 63! (This already rode out to Linux and Windows in Firefox 61)
  • A few issues with the new storage backend for WebExtensions were fixed, and it has been enabled on Nightly by default! This should improve performance for WebExtensions that make heavy use of the storage API – like AdBlock Plus.
  • Thank you to Trisha Gupta for her great work on revamping the user experience on certificate error pages (including a brand new page just for system clock skew). You can try out the new error pages in Nightly and read more about her work in her post to firefox-dev.
    • The new certificate error page displayed when the computer clock is set incorrectly.

      Great Scott!

  • Thank you as well to Kanika Saini for all of her excellent work on the new about:policies page, which should be landing today in Nightly!
    • Showing off about:policies, which lists the policies currently set by system administrators.

      System administrators, rejoice!

  • Advance Test Pilot experiment launched!
    • Check out the blog post to read what that’s all about.

Friends of the Firefox team

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

Fluent

Lint

Mobile

  • Focus iOS launched 7.0 to our TestFlight beta testers last week

Performance

Policy Engine

  • Policy uplifts to ESR 60.2 have finished and are now being verified by QA
  • Kanika Saini’s Outreachy internship last day is today
    • She worked on 19 bugs, from policy improvements, new policies and a=the brand new about:policies page
    • Big thanks to Kanika for her work on these past 3 months! 🎉🎉

Privacy/Security

Search and Navigation

Address Bar & Search
Places
Other

Test Pilot

  • Screenshots
    • Bootstrap removal work is a Q3 goal (1422437)
  • Send Intern Emily Hou is done with her internship. She did a fabulous job working on the Send 2.0 update.

Web Payments

  • Completed
  • In Progress
    • Adding a card network dropdown
    • Working on nicer add/edit forms and improved error handling
    • DOM fixes thanks to Eden who has been re-hired!

4 comments on “These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 43”

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  1. Oriol Brufau wrote on

    It’s strange that my bug 1479130 appears in “Resolved bugs (excluding employees)” and my bug 1474440 appears in “Add-ons / Web Extensions”, but I’m not listed in “Fixed more than one bug”. And it’s not the first time this happens.

    Reply

    1. Matthew Noorenberghe wrote on

      Sorry about that Oriol! When WebExtensions moved to their own Product on Bugzilla, the script to generate the contributors wasn’t updated to reflect that. It’s fixed for the future.

      Reply

  2. Wellington Torrejais da Silva wrote on

    Very nice! Thanks.

    Reply

  3. James Hannan wrote on

    “Typing @amazon followed by your search query is much faster than typing amazon.com, waiting for the page to load, and then starting your search”

    Yeah, until I want to just Go to Amazon.com and look at Cyber Monday deals and no manner of clicking will just do this.

    Make the magnifying glass do the searching and the body of the icon go to the real webpage please.

    Reply

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