These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 49

Highlights

• The DevTools team has added XMLHttpRequest (XHR) Breakpoints! You can break for any XHR, or for XHR’s to a particular URL.

  • 

    XHR breaking your code? In the Firefox Debugger, XHRs break on you!

  • Lots of other goodies coming soon from the DevTools team. See their Project Update section for a taste!
• Erica gave the content blocking exception button in the identity popup a style refresh.

  • 

    Rocking that Private Browsing shade of purple!

• AwesomeBar changes
  • Some query restriction characters have changed:
    • “~” has been removed
    • You can now match only URLs using “$” instead of “@”
    • You can restrict matches to search suggestions using “?” instead of “$”

• The Mobile team blogged about building browsers with Android Components!

Friends of the Firefox team

Introductions

• mconley introduces Andrew Creskey (:acreskey)

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

• Fixed more than one bug
  • :Matthias Kammüller
  • :prathiksha
  • Ariel Burone
  • Arshad Kazmi [:arshadkazmi42]
  • Collin Wing
  • Heng Yeow (:tanhengyeow)
  • Jonas Jenwald [:Snuffleupagus]
  • Oriol Brufau [:Oriol]
  • Qinghao Song
  • Tim Nguyen :ntim
• New contributors (🌟 = first patch)
  • 🌟 Adam Holm cleaned up the styling of the input fields in the Network Monitor’s Edit and Resend interface
  • 🌟 Heng Yeow (:tanhengyeow) fixed up some CSS in the Network Monitor, made it possible to display the Referrer Policy for a given request, made it so that cancelling Edit and Resend sends the user back to the Headers panel and updated the mappings of errors to MDN docs!
  • 🌟 Zameer improved the contrast of the HTTP status code display in the Network Monitor Header panel
  • 🌟 lba_2 fixed some Learn More links and polished up some CSS in the Network panel
  • 🌟 rishabhjairath switched tabbrowser.js to using Services.uriFixup rather than a member variable pointing at that service
  • 🌟 Sam re-ordered about:crashes to put unsubmitted reports back at the top
  • Jack Song ported the About dialog and the Update History section of Preferences to Fluent
  • 🌟 Vineeth Karra cleaned up some tabbrowser.js JavaScript that was using gBrowser instead of this

Project Updates

Activity Stream

• We’re investigating about:newtab page changes through Telemetry pings, to identify malicious takeovers.
• There is a new way to turn off recommendations from CFR
  • In about:preferences, in General, in the Browsing section.

  • 

    Extension recommendations not your thing? That’s okay – here’s how you turn them off.

Add-ons / Web Extensions

• Extensions got finer control over context menus.
• Fallout from the updated about:addons appearance got cleaned up.
• Extension created protocol handlers no longer display a prompt if one is not necessary.
• Part of about:addons got converted to Fluent.  Some other cruft was cleaned up along the way.  Thanks to the MSU students working on this!
• Arshad fixed browser.downloads.download() so that calling it with the saveAs option no longer fails on Android.
• Piro fixed a quirk with browser.tabs.closeWindowWithLastTab.

Application Services (Sync / Firefox Accounts / Push)

• The team is working on Android components for syncing and storing bookmarks 📚 and history 🕒. The library is written in Rust, with an FFI for Java and Kotlin, and a schema based closely on Places 🦀.
• Edouard is working on a device pairing flow for Firefox Accounts, for a better sign-in experience that lets you scan a code on an existing device instead of typing your password everywhere 📱🔒.

Browser Architecture

• XBL in content has been taking nosedives lately thanks to removing XBL definitions for keybindings and the datetime bindings.
• Only around a third (35%) of XBL bindings remain.
• Check out the XUL/XBL replacement newsletter #9 for more updates!

Developer Tools

• Column breakpoints! This is still being worked on, and is currently disabled by default on Nightly under the devtools.debugger.features.column-breakpoints pref. When enabled, pressing Alt will let you choose columns within a line to break on.

  • 

    Because sometimes line breakpoints just aren’t enough.

• Coming soon – track CSS changes in a side panel!

  • 

    A long-requested feature is finally coming together!

• Console Panel
  • Nicolas landed better stack-traces (by sharing React components with the Debugger)

    • 

      Stack traces don’t always have to be bad news!

• Design Tools
  • gl landed multiple grid highlight support
• Network Panel
  • Edit & Resend panel redesign

    • 

      Edit and Resend is looking snazzy!

  • Displaying Referrer Policy (spec)

    • 

      Information is power!

• Got a bunch of new contributions from Outreachy applicants!

Fission

• The Fission-aware messaging simulation landed, and can be enabled by flipping the browser.fission.simulate pref to true. This only covers code in browser/actors and toolkit/actors now.
• <browser>.browsingContext is landing soon.
• A pref to return null on cross-origin iframe access is also landing soon.

Lint

• JSMs now have the same interfaces exposed to them as DOM windows have (at least for WebIDL inclusions). However, we’ve not changed this in ESLint yet, for now update the globals list in tools/lint/eslint/eslint-plugin-mozilla/lib/environments/jsm.js
• Work ongoing for enabling ESLint on more core directories.
  • Landed NetUtils.jsm & netwerk/cookie, netwerk/dns, netwerk/protocol, parts of docshell
  • Bugs in progress for parser, module, more netwerk.

Mobile

• We shipped Android Components 0.30! Here’s the changelog.
  • Added an implementation of concept-storage which is backed by the Rust Places library provided by application-services
  • Firefox Accounts component improvements
  • We started work on a new component to implement the Awesome Bar, both the UI and the underlying infrastructure for multiple search result providers

Performance

• felipe
  • Landed the browser_tabdetach.js reflow test
  • Tab Animations
    • Hoping to have some new try builds by the end of the week which should have all of the animation cases covered
    • Been investigating why some (or all) of the animations frames seem to be dropped on the weak 2018 Quantum reference hardware
      • Tentatively better results by using promiseDocumentFlushed to wait for layout to flush before kicking off the animation on the compositor
• florian
  • about:performance
    • QA is spinning up to test the new Task Manager tool
    • We’re going to be hiding some of the more confusing / unactionable things for release channel users (like system add-ons, preloaded about:newtab, ghost windows, Firefox itself)
  • Have kicked off an experiment to try to get a crashstats-like list of “Top X hangs” from BHR. Feedback welcome!
• Gijs
  • Browser adjustment experiment
    • Initial testing suggests potential for up to 10% improvement by just decreasing the frame rate on low-end machines (ie 2018 reference device).
      • This seems to affect pages that expect more reliable performance of requestAnimationFrame, and might make the user more fingerprint-able
      • Working with rjesup, Bas and smaug to find an appropriate window of time to lower the frame rate
  • Reduce useless about:blank loads
    • Landed a bunch of test fixes
    • This unblocked landing the patch that allows us to not load about:blank uselessly when creating new windows!
• mconley
  • Separate Activity Stream content process landed!
    • Nightly-only right now, and I’ve queued up a security review
    • Investigating some Talos regressions
  • browser-tabsintitlebar.js re-work just landed on inbound! This means no more flushing layout when opening new windows.

Policy Engine

• Policies for certificate installation, locale switching, and the browser startup page landed in 64!
• Working on ESR uplifts for new policies.

Privacy/Security

• We removed a bunch of old content blocking configuration prefs, code and UI that wasn’t needed anymore. Good riddance.
• jkt made it so that we no longer fall back to system principal in docshell.
• Prathiksha updated the storage permission prompt to make a lot more sense.

  • 

    This makes a bit more sense than what we were asking for before.

• Baku made sure that we clean up cookies and site data when the user has enabled session lifetime globally.
• Erica made the “Keep Until” menu in the Site Data section of about:preferences a checkbox instead.

Search and Navigation

Search Shortcuts

• One-off buttons are now hidden when using a shortcut (Bug 1498023)
• Separated shortcuts telemetry from generic search telemetry (Bug 1499193)
• Shortcuts stay in the address bar when selecting search suggestions (Bug 1500516)

Quantum Bar

• Heads-up, address bar changes!
  • The browser.urlbar.history.onlyTyped preference has been removed (1500108)
  • The browser.urlbar.matchBehavior preference has been removed (Bug 1500138)
  • We plan to remove the browser.urlbar.autocomplete.enabled pref (Bug 1502392)
• Added one-off buttons stub (Bug 1502455)
• Landed initial code to filter matches (Bug 1502385)
• Moved various functions from the window scope to UrlbarUtils.jsm (1502039)
• Moved isTabEmpty() to tab.isEmpty (Bug 1502069)
• Added APIs to allow porting more easily existing address bar tests. (Bug 1494334, Bug 1501270)
• Fixed identity popup opening (Bug 1499652)

Test Pilot

• Two new experiments shipping next week: email tabs, price-wise (comparison shopping)
• Side View headed to Shield

Web Payments

• Live user testing with some U.S. participants started yesterday and continues through this week.
• Fixed
  • Re-authenticate 🔑 the user with the OS before sending the payment information to the merchant
    • 

      Here’s the current prompt on Windows. There’s still some clean-up for us to do here to improve the messaging.

      

      Things are a bit clearer here on macOS.

  • Form fields/validation
    • Use a <rich-select> for the billing address picker instead of a <select> 🔽
    • Make the telephone number field required on the payer form if requestPayerPhone is true ☎️
    • Hidden address fields lose their asterisks after changing to a Country or Region that requires those fields 🌎
  • Make a Nightly build for user testing of Milestone 3 (M3)   3️⃣
  • DOM
    • Typo in tests “reqeustPayerPhone” should be “requestPayerPhone” 📞
    • The browser crashes 💥 during the payment process if the ” ; ” punctuation mark is used in fields
• In Progress
  • Handle moving/detaching tabs between windows when a Payment Request is showing
  • An invalid credit card number stored in our autofill database blocks usage of the edit address and credit card dialogs
  • Billing address information isn’t displayed in the received response
  • Original Billing Address is pre-selected after returning from the “Edit Billing Address” screen via “Back” button
  • Move hard-coded `supportedRegions` array to a pref to allow developers outside US/CA to test PaymentRequest