These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 57

Highlights

• We’re running experiments to reduce annoying permission prompts in Firefox
• The DevTools team is bringing back Print Simulation! The bug to add it back into the inspector has landed last week!

• The Font Editor now supports editing letter-spacing too

• The Web Console now groups content blocking messages, if you flip the devtools.webconsole.groupWarningMessages pref. Much easier to read the output!
• The new remote debugging is ON in Nightly now. Check out about:debugging to see the new experience!
  • An “Intent to unship” notice for WebIDE and the Connect dialog has been sent.
• The Oxidation of Firefox Sync continues, with the team writing new components in Rust! 🦀
• Firefox Front-end Performance Update #16 posted, highlighting some performance improvements that are going out in Firefox 67
• We enabled the FIDO U2F API in Nightly, targeting an uplift to Firefox 67
• Access to the logins list from the entry points not tied to a specific website (about:preferences and the main menu) has nearly doubled in the week-and-a-half since adding the main menu item.

• Access from a page context (filtered to show logins for that domain) has grown over 50x in just two days since enabling the autocomplete footer!

Friends of the Firefox team

Here’s a list of all resolved bugs by volunteers

Fixed more than one bug

• Carolina Jimenez Gomez
• Dhyey Thakore [:dhyey35]
• Hemakshi Sachdev [:hemakshis]
• Ian Moody [:Kwan] (UTC+0)
• Martin Stránský [:stransky]
• Mellina Y.
• PhoenixAbhishek
• Suriyaa Sundararuban [:suriyaa]
• Trishul
• Yuan Cheng

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

• Avery Berninger ported about:telemetry to Fluent
• Brian Chen ported the tab context menu, and the synced tabs menu to Fluent
• Yuan Cheng fixed an RTL bug in about:rights
• clement.allain added a Telemetry probe to help gather data about when Telemetry pings fail to be sent
• Dhruvi Butti added a preference to make Web Console autocomplete optional
• Khyati Agarwal got rid of some unnecessary CSS for our menu panels
• Berkay Barlas fixed a bug where Reader Mode wouldn’t return to the default font size when hitting Cmd / Ctrl – 0
• Chris Frey ported about:blocked’s DTDs to Fluent
• lloan:[lloanalas] fixed a glitch where we started showing the full path to a file in the Network Monitor, rather than everything after the domain
• Monika Manuela Hengki got rid of an unnecessary (and erroneous) constant in AppConstants
• mihir17166 got rid of an old PlacesUtils function that we don’t need anymore
• Bisola Omisore (Sola) polished up some CSS for the Network Monitor
• trushita got rid of some dead CSS inside of xul.css
• 🌟 violet.bugreport fixed a bug where the WebExtension Cookie API wouldn’t correctly remove cookies assigned to IPv6 addresses
• Laphets [:Laphets] added a context menu option to copy a JSON response in the Network Monitor to the clipboard

Project Updates

Activity Stream

• The Activity Stream team is transitioning ownership of about:newtab and about:home to Pocket until Firefox 70.
• We’re also expanding the Firefox Messaging System from Activity Stream Router and Contextual Feature Recommendations.
• Improved code coverage by including JSX files, and approaching 100% coverage for JSMs.

Discovery Stream

• For Firefox 68, the team is focusing on feature parity with Activity Stream
  • Added Save to Pocket and Bookmark context menu items
  • Basic personalization with existing domain affinity
• Optimizing performance by loading images lazily, as the page will show many more

Add-ons / Web Extensions

• Uplifted to Firefox 67:
  • Luca (rpl) fixed an issue with extension options pages not working in private browsing.
  • Aswan fixed Fennec so that lightweight (read: old) themes (LWTs) could be migrated to static themes (read: new, web extension).
  • Shane (mixedpuppy) and Luca got some last-minute uplifts so the options for private browsing control for an extension that must be enabled or cannot be enabled are not confusing (thanks to flod for his help).
  • Rob Wu fixed an issue with webRequest use that could result in some uploaded data loss.
• Firefox 68:
  • Work continues on long-term projects for Firefox 68
    • Mstriemer is rewriting about:addons in HTML (recently: theme previews, detail view).
  • Shane made it so raw manifests are read (for localized manifests), as part of the conversion of search plugins to web extensions.
  • Kmaglione’s 25-patch behemoth to “convert built-in LWTs to static themes” (which actually includes supporting refactors for everything from error messages to scope identification, startup, and the removal of previous LWT code that blocked those changes). [Not to be confused with the 9-patch “remove LWT gunk” bug resolution, the 4-patch “remove references to LWT preferences” bug, and the bug that was discovered on Android that prevented LWTs from migrating.]
  • Luca fixed:
    • an issue with browser.storage.onChanged not firing when falsey values were removed (! This will hopefully go to 67 also)…
    • …a bug with extensions not respecting global cookie policy, so that network.cookie.cookieBehavior behaves globally as expected…
    • …and a bug with SidebarUI throwing an error onWindowOpen.
  • Trishul made it so themes don’t have the private browsing toggle and made it so you can’t re-assign an already-assigned keyboard shortcut.
  • violet.bugreport fixed browser.cookies.remove so it successfully removes ipV6 cookies.
  • Kmaglione replaced prepare_test(), which isn’t that big a deal to everyone here, but does have the best description I’ve read in a while.

Applications

Firefox Accounts

• All FxA projects have been consolidated into a monorepo, to make developing and deploying easier. Check out this post from the team for more info 🎪
• Vlad integrated the new device pairing flow into the Android Reference Browser! 📱

Sync

• Check out Edouard’s blog post about how we expose Rust FFIs to Kotlin and Swift. 📝
• Rust, Rust, Rust! 🦀
  • Thom landed a shared networking layer. This lets all our Rust components use Necko (via GeckoView) on Android, instead of the Rust networking stack. 🌐
  • Edouard is replacing OpenSSL with NSS in our components, and got NSS cross-compiling for iOS. 🔒
  • Mark is fixing `SQLITE_BUSY` errors caused by multiple write connections—if you’ve seen crashes while syncing history in the Reference Browser, this is probably why—and is starting work on a Sync Manager for Fenix to support “Choose What to Sync”. 🔄
  • We’re exploring how to integrate some of our Rust components into Desktop, using the Rust XPCOM bindings! Check out Lina’s dev-platform post for some background.
• Rust bookmark merging is ready for testing! 📚
  • Barring any showstoppers, this will be in 68: ride the train to early Beta, then gradually rolled out to Release.
  • Please install the About Sync add-on, flip the `services.sync.engine.bookmarks.buffer` pref to true, restart, and let us know if you spot bugs!
• Phil has been working on a new durable storage server, also written in Rust! 📦

Developer Tools

• Layout Tools
  • Starting to work on Inactive CSS. This lets users see when CSS declarations are valid but do not have any effect on the page (bug, mockup #1 “how inactive CSS declarations look in the inspector”, mockup #2 “example of tooltips telling users why a declaration is inactive”).
  • Coming soon: Making CSS warnings in the console more useful. That means, e.g., not emitting warnings for vendor-prefixed properties when corresponding unprefixed properties exist. Or linking warnings to DOM nodes in the inspector. Thanks to jdescottes, nchevobbe and emilio for working on the platform support.
• Debugger
  • Uplifting several fixes for column breakpoints and windowless workers.
  • Column Breakpoints are pretty solid now. As always, please keep an eye out for issues and report any if needed.
  • Most of the team is busy with general debugger quality issues they’ve prioritized.
• Console
  • Clicking on a location in the console now opens the debugger at the expected column (thanks Mellina (yogmel), bug).
  • Switch `devtools.webconsole.input.autocomplete` if you want to turn autocompletion off entirely (thanks Dhruvi, bug).
• Fission
  • Platform work on this requires the DevTools toolbox to be loaded via `<iframe type=”content”/>`. This means the toolbox document is slightly more “sandboxed” into its frame. This unblocks Fission, which is good! (see bug and bug).

Fission

• Felipe updated about:support to show a more detailed breakdown of process types
• Nika is updating OpenBrowserWindow to take a fission: true argument. Expect some Nightly-only UI soon to open Fission Windows, similar to how we developed Electrolysis. (e10s #2: Electric Boogaloo)
  • This bug also adds a “[F]” suffix to tab tooltips on Nightly to indicate that the tab can run out-of-process iframes.
• mconley has a first pass on a BrowserChild.jsm port to the JS Window Actors if you’re interested in seeing what that looks like
• brennie has ported a good chunk of RemoteWebProgress / WebProcessChild to C++ (while also making them Fission-compatible)
  • Some small chunks remaining, but this has also yielded some nice performance improvements

Lint

• Landed the automatic ESLint configuration for test directories
  • Standard test directory names won’t need .eslintrc.js files
  • Thinking about reorganising other test directories which aren’t in the standard setup to match it, e.g. browser/components/customizableui/test -> browser/components/customizableui/test/browser
• ESLint versions have been bumped.
• Gijs landed the patch that allows basic linting of xul files.
• Ian Moody continues the work to roll-out the ESLint rule no-throw-literal across the tree.
• dom/bindings, dom/push and dom/svg are the latest directories to be enabled for ESLint.

 

Mobile

Firefox for Android

• Nightly 68 now has an ARM64 JIT. ARM64 will improve stability (fewer out-of-memory crashes) and security (better ASLR), but is not expected to have much impact on performance at this time.
• Nightly 68 has enabled Android PGO. Improves Speedometer score by 5%!
• Nightly 68 has reduced paint suppression delay to improve First Contentful Paint time.
• Nightly 68 has enabled Retained Display Lists to improve responsiveness on complex pages.

Password Manager

• Fixed
  • Provide autocomplete experience when formSubmitURL does not match
  • Avoid saving a munged username
  • Allow embedded web extensions to serve/register about: pages in the extension process
  • Username not saved or filled on www.benefits.ml.com (Merrill Lynch benefits)
  • Autocomplete footer
    • “View Saved Logins” text has no contrast with a Dark GTK Theme
    • Only show View Saved Logins dropdown via double-click or arrow-down on empty password fields with no login suggestions
  • Regression fixes
    • The email is not being saved by the Password Manager on Netflix login, only the password
    • passwordManager.xul is lacking padding

Performance

• We’re getting close to landing a test that tracks startup mainthread IO. Once it lands, adding new startup mainthread IO will cause test failures on infra.
• We’re also digging through the list of existing mainthread IO that happens at some point during Firefox startup, filing bugs to get rid of, move off-main-thread, or delay, anything that isn’t strictly necessary for startup itself:
  • Before the “app-startup” category manager notification.

  • After that but before opening the first window

  • After that but before handling user events
  • After that but before idle

• Initial startup numbers from improving readahead on xul.dll are looking very promising

Policy Engine

• Landed support for a whitelist of preferences
  • Will allow us to add prefs people want without the whole process
• Fixed a bug where failed extension installs didn’t reinstall
• Adding basic support for ExtensionSettings for extension whitelisting

Privacy / Security

• Erica added new prefs for controlling features that are available in content blocking
• We now log a console message for TLS 1.0 and 1.1 (bug 1512505)
• Erica made it so that we clear storageAccessAPI permissions when history is cleared.
• Johann unforked the cert error pages!
• Paul defeated evil sites that would change their sub-domain to infinitely ask for permissions

Search and Navigation

Search

• No user-facing updates this time, but lots of ongoing work on multiple fronts:
  • WebExtension default engines
  • New search codes
  • Better test coverage
  • User Research and experiments

Quantum Bar

• Fixed a regression causing us to get search suggestions for file:// uris
• Refining details about the first Quantum Bar experiment, to be run in Q2
• 35 bugs fixed in Quantum Bar in the last 2 weeks, 13 open bugs to reach MVP