These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 48

Highlights

• We’re planning on enabling dedicated profiles per install, as well as downgrade protection
• We released two blog posts summarizing our Anti-Tracking work for Firefox versions 63, 64 and 65
  • We now also have developer documentation for Anti-Tracking
• Thanks to contributor Siddharth Maurya Console added great-looking navigation separators for persistent logging (tweet):
  • 
• A new version of the Pocket personalization algorithm has been deployed on about:newtab in Firefox 64
  • Detailed explanation and PR here
  • Filtering is happening entirely on the client side

Friends of the Firefox team

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

• Fixed more than one bug
  • :prathiksha
  • Ariel Burone
  • Arshad Kazmi [:arshadkazmi42]
  • Diego Pino
  • Divyansh Sharma [:spiro]
  • Florens Verschelde [:fvsch]
  • Heng Yeow (:tanhengyeow)
  • Michael Kohler [:mkohler]
  • Oriol Brufau [:Oriol]
• New contributors (🌟 = first patch)
  • 🌟 Amy Chan (:amychan331) added a file icon to the Network Monitor
  • 🌟 Ariel Burone got rid of some unnecessary UI in the Network Monitor, and also made it much easier to toggle CSS rules in the Inspector
  • 🌟 andrewjgregoryajg fixed up some indentation in tabbrowser.js
  • 🌟 Heng Yeow (:tanhengyeow) fixed a bug where Edit and Re-sending XHRs wouldn’t display the right things and also made empty application/json responses display properly, both in the Network Monitor
  • Raza Haider fixed a visual glitch in about:restartrequired when in RTL mode
  • Korina removed an unused image from toolkit
  • Tim B [:tb120] made it so that numeric keypad keys can be used for shortcuts defined by WebExtensions
  • Ross Brandes added handy Emacs-like keyboard shortcuts for navigating AwesomeBar results on macOS
  • Qinghao (Jack) Song updated about:about to use Fluent

Project Updates

Activity Stream

• Finished moving over snippets to Activity Stream Router
  • Benefit here is that we move away from injecting JS/HTML into about:newtab
  • List of snippets templates currently available
• Added a opt-out functionality to CFR (Contextual Feature Recommender)
  • 
  • [Design visuals]

Add-ons / Web Extensions

• about:addons got a bunch of visual tweaks including conversion to card styles plus many smaller things.
  • 
• about:preferences now shows if an extension has changed the settings for displaying notifications.
• Keys on the number pad may now be used for extension keyboard shortcuts.

Developer Tools

• Gabriel Luong improves massively Inspector opening performance by chaining together his findings from constant profiling into 58 patches.
• Nicolas fixed the Browser Console to handle await statements, completing the console/debugger collaboration to ship `await` support across all Console variants
  • 
• Gabriel extended the CSS Grid highlighter to work with multiple grids
  • 
• RDM now remembers the previous settings when being opened, thanks to Gabriel.
• kenjyO landed outline filtering in the Debugger
  • 
• Console trace now takes an argument to label the trace output
  • 
• Flexbox Inspector: 65 release, 64 DevEdition
  Sneak peak into new diagram design:
  • 

Fission

• Felipe wrote a summary to the DOM team about front-end plans for migration to get feedback from them
  • Have a preliminary thumbs-up from Nika, waiting to hear back from kmag
• Process flipping and browser session “brain transplanting” is going to become the responsibility of the native layer. Hooray!
  • Nika is looking to get rid of gMultiProcessBrowser / support for non-e10s windows for Desktop
  • Heads up – large chunks of content-sessionStore.js are going to be re-written in C++
    • Here’s another bit of ongoing work, where SHistory is going to be send to the parent in the native layer

Fluent

• Fluent 0.9 is landing – more lenient indentation rules
• Fluent in non-system-principal is going to land this week.
• L10nRegistry IPC and Fluent on Startup next

Lint

• comma-dangle now enabled for all of mozilla-central
• Mentored bugs are in progress for enabling eslint on more directories in mozilla-central (mainly various directories in dom, network & docshell at the moment).
• Work is underway to add running lint when you post a patch via arc/moz-phab (eta unknown atm).

Performance

• Major perf.html improvements have just been deployed.
  • New Categorized Activity Timeline
    The most visible change is that the default graph format has changed. Instead of displaying a bar graph of the sampled stack length, the tool now shows the type of activity that occurred at a specific point in time (blue: DOM, purple: layout, green: graphics, yellow: JS, orange: GC/CC, gray: other, empty: idle). You can switch between the activity graph and the stack graph using the radio buttons above the thread & process list.
    • 
  • Navigate faster with the Loupe View
    For those used to timelines in movie editing software, there is an additional timeline view at the top of the call tree panel that combines the category view with an inverted stack chart view. You can use it to quickly navigate the selected thread’s timeline: shift+scroll to zoom, scroll to pan, click to focus the call tree on the selected area.
  • Many more improvements landed in Q3, read Panos’ mailing list post for a longer summary.
• dthayer
  • In the back half of adding Document Splitting support to WebRender
  • This will allow page content and the browser UI to update independently, saving time and energy
  • Landed a patch to remove some main thread IO from InitOSFileConstants, which we call during start-up
• felipe
  • Got rid of a sync layout flush when we drag tabs out into new windows!
  • After focusing a bit on Fission stuff, is getting back to the new Photon tab animations
• florian
  • The new about:performance is soft-launching in Firefox 64, and should be available in the next beta!
    • File bugs here
  • It’s already helping us find performance bugs!
  • There’s still more platform and UI work to do here to get about:performance in line with the UX mock-up
• Gijs
  • Landed a fix to avoid a sync layout flush when changing focus with IME!
  • Needless about:blank loads removal
    • Landed a number of dependencies
    • Trypush results give us confidence that this is going to be worth the effort. Gains between 1 and 7% on sessionrestore, tpaint, etc.
• mconley
  • browser-tabsintitlebar.js work didn’t make 64, unfortunately
    • But I’m very confident of getting it fixed for 65

  • The separate Activity Stream content process (that lets us get the ScriptPreloader win) landed and bounced due to strange and unexpected failures in a web-platform-test. Hoping we can disable the test, since I think it’s only passing by accident.

Privacy/Security

• FastBlock has been disabled in Nightly.
• New certificate error pages are shipping on 64 with a Shield study to ensure no retention issues.
• Prathiksha made us show when an extension is controlling your notification permission settings.
• We now have a new header in the identity popup.
  • 

• You can now view the certificate directly on certificate error pages.
  • This also means that you can inspect the certificate of sites that have HSTS enabled but failed due to certificate errors.
    • 

Search and Navigation

Address Bar & Search

• Bookmarked urls are now autoFilled to-the-next-slash
• Fixed a missed optimization in the character matching algorithm and a case where specially forged string could freeze the Address Bar
• Search Shortcuts Improvements (prototype with screenshots):
  • Suggest and autoFill search shortcuts when ‘@’ is typed as the first character
  • When searching through a search shortcut, only show related suggestions
  • When just the search shortcut is typed show only the top result
• Introducing the Quantum Bar: it is a rewrite of the Address Bar code, currently under development. The main scope is to allow faster experimentation and simpler maintenance. Introduction and a technical overview is available on Firefox source docs. Note: this is not ready for dogfooding yet!
  • Added in-tree technical documentation
  • browser.urlbar.quantumbar also activates the first opened window
  • Handling result selection
  • Matches are now chunked into time-boxed frames (1495181)
  • Fixed some telemetry probes
  • Fixed Customize mode
  • Ported URL tooltip and Go button

Places

• Live bookmarks are no more!
• Fixed a bug where urls containing backslashes couldn’t be removed from history

Test Pilot

• Screenshots migration to pure WebExtension landed in Firefox 64

Web Payments

• Enabled by default in en-US builds for users in the US and CA on macOS and Windows. We aren’t widely publicizing this yet since we don’t have Linux yet and there were some bugs with the OS storage/authentication.
  • Linux will come once we figure out how to re-authenticate the user there.
  • Not riding the trains for a while.
• Using operating system secure storage (macOS Keychain, Windows Credential Manager, libsecret) for credit card encryption keys.
  • Thanks to timdream and the crypto engineering team!
• Switched from a window-modal dialog to a tab-modal one which allows tab-switching and easily closing the tab.
• Preparing to do controlled user testing with real builds soon for 8 users.
• Completed
  • Ensure only fields valid for the given country are saved
  • Add a CVV Tooltip
  • Update credit card number validation
  • Do sorting in pickers
  • Editing the Saved Addresses shows red fields
  • “Forms & Autofill” section appears in “Home” preferences section when visiting about:preferences#home
  • CC is saved even when “There was an error saving the payment card.” message is displayed
• In Progress
  • Make the telephone number field required on the payer form if requestPayerPhone is true
  • An invalid credit card number stored in our autofill database blocks usage of the edit address and credit card dialogs
  • Use a <rich-select> for the billing address picker instead of a <select>