Categories: News

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.
Screenshot of about:performance showing resource usage per tab

The new about:performance

Payment request UI showing 'edit credit card' and shipping address selector views

Friends of the Firefox team

Project Updates

Mobile

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.

New Tab page with Firefox wordmark and search box

Add-ons / Web Extensions

Application Services (Sync / Firefox Accounts / Push)

Browser Architecture

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

NodeJS

Performance

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

Search and Navigation

Places

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

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One comment on “These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 46”

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  1. Ferdinand wrote on

    Praise
    – I love the new about:performance – it gives great insight into what tabs are just sucking resources
    – You could immediately see that https://www.xda-developers.com/oneplus-6t-marketing-renders/ keeps using cpu in a background tab even though the page is doing nothing
    – You could immediately see that https://www.anandtech.com/show/13041/amd-ryzen-5-2400g-and-ryzen-3-2200g-integrated-graphics-frequency-scaling is loading twitter, facebook and google even when I already have extensions that should block that crap
    – Competing about: pages has been a pet peeve of mine since the introduction of the awesombar. Thank you

    Question
    – Why does this page https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2018/10/02/these-weeks-in-firefox-issue-46/ still use 1.55 ? It doesn’t look like the page is doing anything and I am not even scrolling?

    Request
    – Can you put something like a stoplight in every tab that uses black= none, low= green, medium is orange, high=red
    – The taskmanager of Chrome is really handy and I still wish Firefox would get something similar

    Reply

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