These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 46

Highlights

• • James Teh fixed a really annoying accessibility bug where search suggestions were interfering with the focused element.
  • We’re officially launching a new privacy tool called Firefox Monitor. You can read the official announcement and a bit of behind the scenes.
  • Focus for iOS 7.0 went live last week, Focus for Android 7.0 with GeckoView is scheduled for release on October 2.
  • Florian has been landing some massive improvements to the new about:performance.
    • To try out the new page, flip the dom.performance.enable_scheduler_timing pref to true, and restart your browser (or you’ll get crashed).
    • Please file bugs in Toolkit :: Performance Monitoring.
    • Instead of displaying ‘dispatches’ and ‘duration’, the values are combined into something (labelled “Energy Impact”) that users can better understand, with “High/Medium/Low/None” categories.
    • Sort order is more stable, and subframes/workers have values.
    • It’s possible to select a row. A double click will select the tab.
    • Tarek Ziade is making good progress on counting WebExtension activity in frame scripts, and is experimenting with collecting memory information per tab.

The new about:performance

• A grab bag of Web Payments improvements! The team has been making great progress, and they’re almost ready for user testing.
  • We now support all countries 🌎 in form autofill preferences for use by Payment Request.
  • There’s lots of form validation improvements ✅
  • Nicer card/address pickers.
  • 💳 Improved credit card form layout and added placeholder credit card network logos.
  • String changes to support user testing
  • And, of course, improvements to the DOM API: implementing PaymentResponse.retry(), onmerchantvalidation and MerchantValidationEvent, and PaymentResponse.prototype.onpayerdetailchange.

Friends of the Firefox team

• Fixed more than one bug
  • Adam Hillier [:ahillier]
  • Arshad Kazmi [:arshadkazmi42]
  • Jonas Jenwald [:Snuffleupagus]
  • Preeti [:preeti]
  • Shivam Singhal [:championshuttler]
  • Tim Nguyen [:ntim]
• New contributors (🌟 = first patch)
  • 🌟 Alec Clarke removed an unneeded _manifestURI field and MozApplicationManifest message from our browser bindings
  • 🌟 Artyom Pranovich made it so that if a user attempts to install an add-on that’s already installed but disabled, the add-on will be enabled
  • 🌟 dev increased the input history limit in the DevTools console, and also got rid of an obsolete reference from an .eslintrc
  • 🌟 Jack Smith ported about:url-classifier to Fluent
  • 🌟 Kajal Kumari Sah (:kajalsah) got rid of an unneeded Places maintenance task
  • 🌟 Korina swapped out an old PNG image for a shiny SVG image
  • 🌟 Luke Schwalfenberg [:lschwalf] fixed a broken about:policies link from about:support
  • 🌟 Collin Wing ported about:profiles to Fluent
  • 🌟 Siddharth Maurya [:savvysiddharth] made about:privatebrowsing more accurate by adding “copied text” to the list of things about:privatebrowsing reports that Firefox will save in Private Browsing mode

Project Updates

Mobile

• The second beta of Firefox for iOS 14.0 was sent to our TestFlight audience.
• Android Components 0.24 shipped!
  • We added support for thumbnail images on tabs.
  • We now have a new component that protects user data using AndroidKeyStore.
  • Our settings now have more support for WebView settings.
• Android Components 0.23 shipped!
  • Our engine component now supports fullscreen mode, clearing browsing data, and intercepting errors.
  • We added support for processing ACTION_SEND intents.
  • The new sync-loginscomponent was introduced.
  • We added initial documentation for our browser-session component.
• Lockbox iOS 1.3 went live Tuesday September 18th.
  • Check out the blog post!
  • Read up on the release details.
  • With iOS 12 you can automatically fill your usernames and passwords from Firefox Lockbox into apps and websites.

Activity Stream

• The team is running an experiment with the new single overlay onboarding experience in Release.
• The Contextual Feature Recommender, a doorhanger that recommends add-ons, is now in Nightly, and will run as an experiment in Beta next week.
• We now show the logo and wordmark when only the search panel is enabled.

Add-ons / Web Extensions

• Many pieces for the new userScripts API landed. See the tracking bug to follow them all.
• The delayed background script startup optimization is now enabled on Fennec.
• Location bar focus is now handled properly when extensions open new tabs.
• A glitch with uninstalling themes was fixed.
• Links in extension sidebars now work properly.
• We no longer get a yellow-screen-of-death if a language pack is updated from an unpacked version or removed from disk.
• And of course, bootstrap.js removal continues…

Application Services (Sync / Firefox Accounts / Push)

• Account recovery keys have shipped for Firefox Accounts! 🔑
• The team is working on a bookmarks 📚 and history 🕒 Android components, based on the Places schema.
  • We’re currently building a command-line awesomebar demo, using Desktop’s autocomplete algorithm.
• We have a syncable logins store, based on the iOS implementation, and an Android component that’s now integrated into Lockbox 🔒.
• We’re writing a Sync storage server in Rust! 🖥
• There’s a prototype of porting the synced bookmark merger on Desktop to Rust 🦀.
  • The patch has a minimal mozStorage Rust wrapper, and a mozISyncedBookmarksMirror component implemented in Rust. The merger can run off the main thread, unlike JS.
• Myk has also been working on an XPCOM component for rkv 📦.

Browser Architecture

• Check out the latest Browser Architecture Newsletter and the XUL/XBL Replacement Newsletter to read about what everyone’s been working on!

Developer Tools

• Arai’s work to massively cut down DevTools opening delay on script-heavy pages by fixing a 5 year old bug to add Debugger.findSources. This removes a 1s hang when opening the Console on Gmail.

Lint

• ESLint is now enabled for editor/.
• Picked up performance improvement from eslint-plugin-html.

NodeJS

• Removing the --disable-nodejs flag is still planned, but no longer a blocker for making Node available to select moz.build files.
• Up next: beta support for moz.build files, use for JSX transpilation by the debugger team, ESLint integration.

Performance

• dthayer
  • Has sorted out an Nvidia bug with client storage that was causing some really strange graphics artifacts on macOS. Patch is reviewed, hopefully landing soon.
  • Removed some InitOSFileConstants’ main thread IO.
    • This is a qf:p1 targeted for Firefox 64, so it’s great to see this coming along.
    • Unfortunately, it’s unlikely that all of InitOSFileConstants will come off of the main thread, but some is better than none! dthayer will be filing a follow-up bug for the rest.
  • Starting to look into Document Splitting for WebRender.
    • This should isolate the updating of the browser UI from the web content, which should be more efficient.
• Gijs
  • Removing useless about:blank loads.
    • Fixed a bunch of tests.
    • Recent trypush (and an earlier one with more tests/platforms) indicating remaining work will likely take at least another few weeks – probably 5-10 other test issues to sort out. They often don’t reproduce locally, and seem to largely be Linux-focused.
  • Working on a qf:p1 for removing a layout flush when focusing the URL bar.
    • Slowly making inroads here, but needing to spend time untangling how focus causes flushes only some of the time.
• mconley
  • Removing the layout flush for Tabs in Titlebar proceeding apace. Have it looking good on macOS, Linux, Windows 10, and Windows 7 “aero”. Need to fix up Windows 7 non-compositor, and then I can have this up for review.
    • Removed the toolbar.toolbox XBL property as a dependency.
  • Tested the background process priority manager on the 2018 Quantum Reference hardware, discovered a tab switcher bug, and got that fixed and uplifted.
    • This caused mconley to file a bug about how the compositor seems to have more information than it’s letting on.
  • Working on eliminating CPOWs from WebProgressChild messages. This will hopefully unblock the separate content process for Activity Stream from landing, which will enable the ScriptPreloader work that imjching worked on a few months back that improves about:newtab loading time.

Policy Engine

• Mac policy engine try builds available, and Mac admins already love it! Thanks to Stephen Pohl!
• Working on security devices, certificates, and generic prefs for 64.
• MSI installer work happening as well.

Fission

• Fission is our codename for the process-per-site isolation project.
• On the front-end, we’re converting frame scripts to actors. Check out:
  • https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/browser/actors
  • https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/actors
  • Actors declared in nsBrowserGlue.js and ActorManagerParent.jsm
• Bug 1490810 – Simulate Fission for browser actors by blocking them from receiving subframe events
• Bug 1493984 – Simulate Fission behavior for browser actors’ receiveMessage

Search and Navigation

Address Bar & Search

• Nicolas made the Address Bar complete about: addresses (autocomplete is being fixed)
• Fixed a bug where copying a search shortcut from the Address Bar copied the wrong string
• We’re actively investigating cases where autocomplete doesn’t work with bookmarks, when history is disabled or cleared on shutdown
• Fixed a bug when mozParams can’t be the first entries in a search engine definition

Places

• Fixed a bug causing a favicon to be assigned to the wrong page
• Fixed a bug where the downloads API may call into the history API causing a waterfall of console errors

Test Pilot

• Conversation getting started around reusable React components for websites that fit the Photon UI specs.
• Screenshots: bootstrap removal should land this week 🤞, see the metabug if you’re curious!
  • Bootstrap removal introduced Talos regressions that seem to be caused by unexpected storage init at startup.
  • Looks like we’ll finally be able to enable Screenshots for all tests, based on an encouraging Try run from yesterday
  • Huge thanks to aswan & kmag for jumping on add-ons bugs surfaced by the migration

Web Payments

• Only 8 remaining bugs for Milestone 3 after which we’ll enable on Nightly by default (not riding the trains yet). 🎉
  • Bug 1470168 – Add tooltip beside ‘save to Firefox’ checkbox
  • Bug 1477102 – Show card network logos on the card add/edit screens
  • Bug 1490805 – Add the CVV security code field to the add card form and make it required in all places
  • Bug 1432939 – Link to Firefox Options/Preferences from the PaymentRequest dialog

Below the fold

• [standard8] General reminder that xpcshell-tests can use the Developer Tools for debugging. A new section has been added to the xpcshell-test page on MDN on how to do this.
• [mconley] I’m getting rid of contentWindowAsCPOW, contentDocumentAsCPOW, and the APIs that rely on them. Please don’t use these anymore.
• [felipe] LegNeato will be working on Firefox desktop development efficiency and is looking for feedback
• [johannh] The update to macOS Mojave breaks Firefox compilation unless you install header files manually. Then it compiles successfully, but you’ll have a black window unless you downgrade to the 10.13 SDK.
  • ac_add_options --with-macos-sdk=/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.13.sdk
  • There’s a dev.platform post, too.
• We now have support for Array<T> in XPIDL. That means that all these awkward entries can be converted to more maintainable API signatures.