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.

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    Shiny new controls for Content Blocking in about:preferences!

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    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.

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    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!

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      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.

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    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!

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    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)

• Fixed more than one bug
  • Abdoulaye O. LY
  • Jorg K (GMT+2)
  • Thi Huynh
• New contributors (🌟 = first patch)
  • 🌟 Corentin Noël improved how Firefox integrates with the GNOME notification system
  • Siddhant got rid of the deprecated callback API to getShortcutOrURIAndPostData
  • 🌟 Sahil Bhosale refactored some PanelMultiView code to use a simpler way of getting element bounds without flushing

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

• Some issues with browser_style and checkboxes were fixed.
• WebExtension keyboard shortcut handlers and menu onclick handlers can now call other methods that require user input.
• The tabs.onHighlighted event now handles multi-select tabs
• Inadvertent restrictions on extension managed proxies have been removed.

Fluent

• Fluent now manages directionality of documents
• Fluent has been updated to 0.6
• Fluent 0.7 is in the second RFC Phase
• Get ready for an increased rate of migration from September

Lint

• ESLint has now been upgraded to 5.3.0
• ESLint has been enabled for dom/presentation

Mobile

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

Performance

• felipe
  • Finished Bug 1369466 – RemotePageManager lazy-fication work!
    • 3.5% cpstartup win, 1% memory (Base Content JS)
  • Landed Bug 1470324 Don’t load EnterprisePolicies in the content process until a policy is checked
• florian
  • Improved tab reordering performance by avoiding lots of style flushes when moving tabs with the keyboard!
• Gijs
  • Landed a patch to avoid loading WebContentConverter.js too early during startup!
  • Got rid of a place where we synchronously flush layout in the AwesomeBar dropdown
    • We expect, however, that this mostly moves the cost of the flushes to the horizontal overflow flushes.
  • Continuing work on removing about:blank loads for new windows etc.

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

• After doing a Shield study we’re landing Firefox Monitor as a system add-on in m-c. You can find the Firefox Monitor metabug here.

Search and Navigation

Address Bar & Search

• Matt Brubeck fixed a regression where ‘http://x’ would incorrectly load a search bookmark with keyword ‘x’
• Thi Huynh replaced this.DOMWindowUtils with window.windowUtils in urlbarBindings.xml
• Fixed a regression where rtl based text could overlay itself in the urlbar

Places

• Lina added a maintenance task to clean up duplicate URLs.
• Annotations Feature Removal:
  • Removed nsIDownloadHistory (replaced by an option to PlacesUtils.history.update to add annotations).
  • PlacesUtils.setCharsetForURI has been replaced and a new function implemented which also avoids main thread sync io.
  • Removed more page annotation related functions from nsIAnnotationService
  • Removed nsIAnnotationObserver as it is no longer necessary
• Removed PlacesUtils.mobileFolderId (all PlacesUtils.*FolderIds will likely be removed eventually).

Other

• Dan Banner updated the favicons for the default bookmarks in Nightly
• The QuantumBar meta bug has been opened to track work on re-building the AwesomeBar dropdown panel to be more performant and useful

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
  • Added branding to the dialog, generic and merchant-supplied error messages, and simple validation.
  • Checkbox for “Save credit card to Firefox” should be unchecked by default
  • Improvements to the required field asterisks
• 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!