Categories: News

These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 59

Highlights

  • Wow, what a weekend! Hopefully your add-ons are all working now.
    • A small set of users are still reporting add-on outages. We suspect that the Master Password and Anti-virus software are interfering with the original fix for those users. We’ve released 66.0.5 to try to handle those cases.
  • Outreachy interns for this summer have been announced
    • Mozilla is mentoring 8 students in this round. Thank you to all the mentors and all the applicants!
  • The Google Summer of Code students and projects have been publicly announced! Check out what folks will be working on this summer!
  • MattN wrote a blog post summarizing the Password Manager Improvements in Firefox 67

Friends of the Firefox team

Here’s a list of all resolved bugs.

Fixed more than one bug

  • Chris Frey [:nautilus]
  • Florens Verschelde :fvsch
  • Kestrel
  • lloan:[lloanalas]
  • Mohd Umar Alam [:umaralam48]
  • Neha
  • Tim Nguyen :ntim

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

Project Updates

Activity Stream

  • A new Contextual Feature Recommendation for Sync is coming to the bookmark Star UI

"Sync your bookmarks everywhere" recommendation in the star UI

  • A lot of improvements and fixes to the new Pocket New Tab, specifically around network failure states.

Add-ons / Web Extensions

Applications

Lockwise

  • Rebranding going on this week.
  • The team is working on polishing the extension for an initial release, and then integrating the extension into desktop Firefox.

Firefox Accounts

  • Ed and Vlad are finalizing the sign-in UX for Fenix, our next-generation Android browser 🚦
  • Ed landed Rust APIs for FxA device registration and New Send Tab. Grisha is working on integrating this into Android Components so that Fenix can use it 📑

Sync and Storage

Push

  • Jonathan and JR are bringing Push for internal Mozilla consumers (New Send Tab, FxA verification) to Fenix! 📣

Browser Architecture

  • RKV conversions have been rolled back for now while we investigate issues migrating from 32-bit to 64-bit builds.
  • browser.html conversion ready to go, but waiting until the next cycle.
  • Fluent cache for chrome documents ready to land. This will fix corner cases where DOM mutations might not trigger Fluent updates.

Developer Tools

Console

  • Jefry Lagrange added a way to export console output to a file in bug 1517728.
  • “Copy as Fetch” and “Use in console” have been added to the network monitor context menu in bug 1540054.
  • When CSS warnings are displayed in the console, you can now expand them (like a console group) to reveal all the DOM nodes that this warning applies to. So it allows you to jump from a CSS warning in the console directly to the inspector.

Screenshot of expanded CSS warning showing affected elements

Debugger

  • Work on DOM & Event breakpoints started
  • Progress with captured stacks for various errors appearing in the Console panel (for web developers) or Browser Console window (for browser + addon developers).

Network

  • Local HTTP requests are marked as secure now (bug).

Screenshot of `localhost` with green lock icon in Network monitor

Remote Debugging

  • DevTools shortcuts now supported in about:devtools-toolbox (bug)
  • Favicons and user friendly titles for about:debugging and about:devtools-toolbox (bug)

Screenshot of wrench and window favicons for debugging and toolbox

  • Closable error messages (and UI cleanup) (bug)

Screenshot of "connection failed" error and "connection still pending" warning with close buttons

Documentation

Fission

Lint

Mobile

Android Components

  • Support for built-in WebExtensions has been added! The new Reader View feature component (in Fenix and Reference Browser) is built on top of this.

Password Manager

Performance

Performance tools

  • Welcoming Raj Meghpara, our new GSoC student! He’s going to work on Instruments import support for Firefox Profiler.
  • Network tooltips are now displayed as soon as the line is hovered.
  • The publishing flow has been streamlined (ux issue)

New look of publish panel in Firefox Profiler with inverted checkboxes

  • More tools in the web console:

List of available profiler information in the console

  • MOZ_PROFILER_HELP env variable gives help to profile Firefox startup.

Picture-in-Picture

Privacy/Security

Search and Navigation

Quantum Bar

  • Fixed 19 Bugs in the last 2 weeks
  • Quantum Bar is enabled by default in Firefox 68 🎉🎉🎉
  • Still working on a few remaining bugs
  • Designing and discussing WebExtension APIs for the first experiment

2 comments on “These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 59”

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  1. john wrote on

    What is up with the Firefox for Android beta builds on Google Play? No updates?

    Reply

  2. Derp wrote on

    Is it possible you use a android version Firefox doesn’t support anymore?

    Reply

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