Categories: News

These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 61

Highlights

  • OOP iframes somewhat work now on Nightly!
    • For the super-brave, you can test it yourself by creating a boolean preference fission.autostart and setting it to true, and then restarting Firefox
    • Please file bugs that you find against this metabug
    • Expect general instability for the next little while
  • Event Breakpoints enabled on Nightly, allowing you to break on specific event type (e.g. mouse click).
    • The Debugger showing the Event Listener Breakpoints pane, allowing developers to set breakpoints on individual events.

      Not sure where your click events are being handled? An Event Listener Breakpoint will help you track that down by letting you break on any click event, and stepping through each listener!

  • Blocked resources are displayed in the Network panel (rendered in red and using new status label) (platform bug, DevTools meta)
    • Blocked resources in the Network Monitor are displayed and marked in red.

      The blocked resources are highlighted in red.

  • AVG blocked our access to logins.json and broke our password database for some of our users. We released an addon, heartbeat message, and a SUMO article to help users recover from the data loss. Thanks to everyone who helped with this effort!
  • The flow for publishing Gecko Profiler performance profiles is streamlined! In addition, the profiler now accepts gzipped profiles from Firefox, letting us send larger profile data from addon (it was a problem because of the IPC data limit)
    • An animated GIF demonstrating the new publishing flow for the Firefox Profiler tool

      Sharing profiles with Firefox developers recorded during slow times helps us investigate and fix performance problems.

Friends of the Firefox team

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

Fixed more than one bug

  • Bryan Kok [:transfusion]
  • Chujun Lu
  • Florens Verschelde :fvsch
  • Heng Yeow (:tanhengyeow)
  • janelledement
  • jaril
  • Karan Sapolia
  • Kestrel
  • Masatoshi Kimura [:emk]
  • Michael Krasnov
  • Miriam
  • premk
  • Thomas
  • Tim Nguyen :ntim

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

Project Updates

Developer Tools

Console
  • Console responsive toolbar redesign
    • The Web Console shown in both a wide and slim mode.
  • New, better warning groups, as part of our “unclutter the Console panel” effort. Compare the amount of content in the following screenshots!
    • Showing grouped warnings in the Web Console.
  • “Export Console content to file” option available through the Console panel context menu.
    • The context menu for the Web Console showing the item for exporting content to a file.
Debugger
  • Displaying extension name in the Sources panel (bug)
    • The Sources list in the Debugger showing a list of sources from a WebExtension
  • Original Rust variables are shown. Thanks to Yury Delendik’s work on compiling dwarf metadata in sourcemaps and our existing map scopes functionality.
    • The Debugger showing the original Rust source from a WASM module thanks to sourcemaps.
Inspector
  • The node infobar, displayed at the top of the highlighted area, will now display whether the highlighted element is a flex or grid container or item (bug).
    • The Inspector Picker now showing additional context information for some layout, including whether or not the selected item is a flex container or a flex item.
  • Bug 1464440 – [meta] subgrid support in grid inspector
    • Showing the Grid Inspector on a layout with a subgrid layout.

      Subgrid support is coming!

Documentation
  • DevTools documentation for 68 updated.

Fission

Lint

New Tab Page

Password Manager

Performance

Performance tools

  • Added a context menu to the network panel.
    • Showing the context menu on top of the Network panel of the Firefox Profiler tool.

      This should help make it easier for Firefox developers to navigate performance profiles and focus in on the important things.

  • Sub category information in the sidebar
    • Showing the submenu in the Firefox Profiler, breaking down the categories that the selected samples fall into.

      This submenu helps Firefox developers know where your precious time is being spent when examining performance profiles.

  • Javascript only stacks now include more information about the things that are happening on C++ side.
    • The Call Tree Viewer in the Firefox Profiler tool, showing JavaScript stacks interleaved with frames that indicate what was happening in the DOM native layer.

      Special frames have been added in the JavaScript-only mode of the Call Tree Viewer which help make it clearer what the JavaScript was doing with the DOM.

  • More markers have backtraces in the tooltip now.
    • A tooltip showing the stacktrace for a Notify Observer marker in the Firefox Profiler

      Firefox Developers get more hints this way about why certain things happened that might be taking up time.

Picture-in-Picture

Search and Navigation

Search
Quantum Bar
  • On track to be released with Firefox 68, fixed a few regressions in these weeks
  • Working on many experiments: at least 2 of them targeted to 69, 3 targeted at 70, more incoming
  • Started working on a partial address bar UI refresh for Firefox 70 (internally known as the Mega Bar)
  • Started working on legacy address bar code removal
Places

User Journey

  • Created new “Messaging System” bugzilla component currently covering What’s New panel, Contextual Feature Recommendations, Onboarding / First Run, Snippets
  • Adding Feature Callouts to toolbar and menu items as well as What’s New to highlight Firefox features and updates
  • Turned on Trailhead “Join Firefox” about:welcome messaging with “Privacy” cards for all locales in 68+

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