These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 45

Highlights

• We released two blog posts that outline our product and platform strategy against trackers and other annoyances:
  • Changing Our Approach to Anti-tracking
  • Why we need better tracking protection
  • Also worth reading: An (unofficial) blog post on the matter by Ehsan: On leveling the playing field and online tracking
• The DevTools team got some goodies landed in Firefox 63:
  • Accessibility Panel is now enabled by default!

Try it on your own site!

• We now have better error messages in the console when attempting to access null or undefined properties

That code looked alright to me.

• The Font Editor is now available
• WebComponents are easier to work with! Check out this blog post about that, and try some examples!

Friends of the Firefox team

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

• Fixed more than one bug
  • Abdoulaye O. LY
  • Arshad Kazmi
  • Florens Verschelde
  • Manish [:manishkk]
  • Oriol Brufau [:Oriol]
  • Sören Hentzschel
  • Tim Nguyen :ntim
• New contributors (🌟 = first patch)
  • Anushi Maheshwari[:Anushi1998] improved the formatting of some of our in-tree Telemetry documentation
  • 🌟 arika.arnzen cleaned up some of our CSS by combining two identical selectors and their rules
  • Siddhant [:Siddhant085] made it so that exporting bookmarks respects the browser.bookmarks.max_backups pref
  • 🌟 Jason Chapin removed an obsolete PNG image
  • 🌟 Hemakshi Sachdev made it so that cached data is not included in the total transferred data calculation in the Network Monitor
  • 🌟 Tushar Arora [:tushararora] fixed the menus WebExtension API so that browser.menus.update can update icons as well
  • 🌟 Yash Johar updated the Responsive Design Mode icon in our DevTools

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

• Extensions can now access the attention property on tabs, and can set the highlighted property from browser.tabs.update().
• Extensions can now be uninstalled directly from a right-click on their toolbar icon.  The “Manage Extension” link in the same context menu also got fixed.
• Menus created by extensions can now update their icons and be hidden.
• Themes can now change the sidebar border color.

Activity Stream

• Pocket team is working on a new version of the personalization engine
  • Overview doc
  • A bunch of work has landed
• Working on getting the Contextual Feature Recommender and the new version of Snippets based on Activity Stream Router ready for experiments

Browser Architecture

• Work on Mentat is paused
• UCOSP students working on removing XUL from about:config.

Developer Tools

• GCLI removed as of Sept. 5, 2018
• :yulia gave a great presentation on fission to the team
• Enhancements to RDM in collaboration with WebCompat team
  • support viewport render mode, :bradwerth
  • :gl about to land support for custom UA
• DevTools UX workweek kicked off design system (live) work

Fluent

• document.l10n WebIDL has landed!
  • Fluent available in all system principals documents
  • No need for <script src=”chrome://global/content/l10n.js”/>
• Next steps – enable non-system principals, and web extensions

Lint

• Comma-dangle landed for browser/, services/, taskcluster/ toolkit/
• Dave Townsend enabled the no-sequences rule, which caught a few mistakes and some errors in test files.
• The main configuration is now based on eslint:recommended.
  • There were a few useful recommended rules we didn’t have enabled, so they are now.
  • A few other rules from the recommended configuration are turned off, but we’ll look into enabling them soon.

Mobile

• Focus 7.x WebView/GeckoView A/B experiment is live!
  • Teaser: Dan Callahan has a related post ready to go for later this week. Stay tuned!
• 🎉 Release: Android Components 0.22
  • Firefox for Amazon’s Fire TV is now using the browser-session, feature-session and browser-engine-system components. This simplified the code base by removing ~4000 lines of code (see PR #1044 and PR #982 for details).

Performance

• Greg Tatum
  • Screenshots and Network information now deployed in the Timeline – Profile example

Gecko Profiler: We just really like to watch the browser being slow.

• • • Turn on the screenshots feature in the add-on dropdown:
      • Mac OS only (help may be needed for additional platform support)
      • Make sure WebRender is not enabled.

• 
• Importing other formats (experimental previews)
  • Linux’s perf:
    • Drop a profile here
  • Chrome profiles:
    • Drop a profile here
    • Converted profile example

• florian
  • Working with Tarek and Bryan Bell from UX to figure out how best to expose more powers to users in about:performance
    • Now that the concept has proven itself, we’re looking to see what we need to do to ship this thing to users.
• dthayer
  • Landed a fix to the background tab process manager to make sure it only impacts web content processes.
    • mconley and dthayer are testing enabling the background tab process manager. If all goes well, we might try to enable it just on Nightly to see how it shakes out.
    • You can test it yourself on Windows by creating a new pref, dom.ipc.processPriorityManager.enabled, and setting it to true.
  • Has patches up to shift more code over to the new batched Places observer API
  • Has a patch up to get rid of some hashtable lookups and mallocs when using SVG and CSS filters
• felipe
  • Has some try builds up with the beginnings of the Photon tab animations
    • Still very much a WIP, but it’s great to see tab animations come off of the main thread!

Unfortunately, the GIF is running at 30fps and doesn’t do the smoothness justice.

• Gijs
  • Made Windows Taskbar preview code do less work when restoring a large session
  • Slogging through the work to make our <browser>’s not load useless about:blank pages when we know they’re going to go somewhere else.
    • Made it so that the initial browser in a window is inserted dynamically
    • Simplified some of our testing code as part of it
• mconley
  • Working with dao to find the best way to avoid doing layout flushes when calculating how to display our tabs in the titlebar
  • Re-enabled / renewed a bunch of perf-related Telemetry probes that were about to expire
  • Working on renewing a bunch of other perf-related Telemetry probes as well.

Privacy/Security

• Shipping Shield Studies for FastBlock and Cookie Restrictions
• Vinoth is working on removing all usage of eval() with system privileges.
• Firefox Monitor shipped as a system add-on to 62.0 en_US users. Testing – pref’d on for 0.5% via Normandy.

Search and Navigation

Address Bar & Search.

• Gijs changed url canonization to make it more coherent across browsers and platforms. CTRL+enter is now used to canonize words to urls, it’s no more possible to canonize to .net or .org, but the suffix can be controlled with “browser.fixup.alternate.suffix”. A new pref “browser.urlbar.ctrlCanonizesURLs” allows to use ctrl to open in a new tab instead.
• Fixed a regression where unvisited bookmarks were not autofilled anymore after a Clear History.
• Improved the highlight on Top Sites Search Shortcuts to be applied more consistently
• Fixed a few url overflow and cursor issues after recent changes to the overflow behavior
• Firefox now accepts both “application/json” and “application/x-suggestions+json” as MIME types for OpenSearch Suggestions
• Fixed a regression where locale specific Search Engines could re-appear after being hidden by the user

Places

• Removed some more legacy code
• Fixed a bug where sites with bogus (empty) favicon <link>s would not get a favicon

Test Pilot

• Ops is going to be using Send as the first test of hosting on GCP
• Screenshots: bootstrap removal patch is under review (on github)
  • Thanks to :aswan for moving the enable/disable pref observer code to nsBrowserGlue (bug 1488971)

Web Payments

• Completed highlights
  • PaymentResponse.retry() method
  • Card network dropdown on the credit card add/edit screen (affects form autofill as well)
  • Bunch of error page and form validation fixes
  • Change autofill storage’s APIs to be async
• In Progress
  • Bug 1429181 – Credit card network validation on entry and summary pages
  • Bug 1481972 – Support all countries in form autofill preferences for use by Payment Request
  • Bug 1480717 – Credit card form can be saved without a billing address
  • Bug 1472026 – Implement PaymentResponse.prototype.onpayerdetailchange
  • Bug 1463545 – Replace grid layout of <rich-option> subclasses with new UI spec
  • Bug 1486954 – Encrypt credit card numbers with OS key store instead of Master Password