Categories: News

These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 64

Highlights

Friends of the Firefox team

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

Fixed more than one bug

  • :Matthias Kammüller
  • Chris Muldoon
  • Florens Verschelde :fvsch
  • Heng Yeow (:tanhengyeow)
  • Itiel
  • Krishnal Ciccolella
  • Maliha Islam [:mislam]
  • Megan Bailey
  • Myeongjun Go
  • Nils Maier [:nmaier]

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

Browser Architecture

Developer Tools

  • Inspector:
  • Console
    • Removed CSS Warnings “CSSOM” message that was confusing for people — Bug 1574791
    • Only evaluate selected text in console (on the way to Scratchpad parity) — Bug 1576563
    • Fission related:
      • Many improvements on Multi-target Browser Console / Browser Toolbox Console
        • Almost everything is working but
          • Jump from logged content node to the inspector
          • “Jump to definition” icon not showing up when logging content function (WIP to fix this)
  • Responsive design mode
    • Changes to better match the behavior of Chrome devtools:
      • Landed Bug 1575097 to make screen.width and window.outerWidth report the simulated screen.
      • Landed Bug 1572840 to make RDM pane scale up/down with changes to page full zoom.

Fission

  • DOM fission team in work week
  • Emma finished porting the Page Info dialog to be Fission-compatible
  • Working on porting BrowserTestUtils. Changing the syntax of synthesizeMouse/Touch to allow browsingContexts to be supplied. Existing syntax of passing an array of selectors is being removed in favour of passing the correct browsingContext.

Lint

New Tab Page

  • Our Discovery Stream changes rollout should start today (September 10th).
    • Main changes are remote configuration.
    • More control over how where and when we add sponsored Pocket content.
    • We also have a new backend for sponsored content that goes out with the rollout, it adds better authoring tools for content creation and management.
  • For 71, we have a focus on
    • Updates to sponsored content dismissal flow. There are small cases where dismissal isn’t quite where we went. Goal is this would reduce overall sponsored content the user sees, but reduce sponsored content opt outs.
    • Some UI and UX updates to cards and promos.

Password Manager

Performance

Performance Tools

  • The base profiler is finally enabled on Windows, to capture the beginning of startup. Example of a cold startup profile captured on the 2017 quantum reference hardware
  • We have ongoing work progressing well about:
    • visualizing statistics about the overhead caused by the profiler during a profile
    • collecting native memory allocation stacks
    • visualizing JS tracer data
    • reducing the cost of profiler markers by making them allocation-free.

Picture-in-Picture

 

Search and Navigation

Search:

Address Bar:

User Journey

  • So far 69 release messages have launched successfully, we’re getting some early data back for extended triplets
  • For 71, we’re working on more experiments first run, some new CFRs, better prioritization and mapping of messages to user preferences, figuring out some baseline performance tests

4 comments on “These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 64”

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  1. Chaython R Meredith wrote on

    So it’s a VPN add-on?
    Why not just call it Mozilla VPN

    Reply

    1. Chaython R Meredith wrote on

      Why does FireFox in linux have such an out of date GUI? [the giant back button, massive scrollbar, no option to hide the [fold-up/ minimize, maximize, close] top bar. Chromium in Linux looks exactly the same as the Windows Chrome, sleek and clean. Chromium also outperforms FF in basically every task. I’ve also had some major bugs in FF, where an update generally did fix them, but I had to reinstall, it wasn’t just repaired by an update. Where as in Chrome outside of canary, I have never had any serious issues.
      Mozilla’s products and branding are still inconsistent; I like the push to privacy, but if privacy is a new priority why not disable “Data Collection and Use” by default, or at least prompt during install.
      Why is FF still reliant on loop-backsl chrome has none, FF has 10, [loop-backs may also allow malicious apps to access the web? By-passing firewall rules by passing through FF; my firewall has an option to disable loop-backs, which I have enabled, but there’s a compatibility rule to allow loop-backs in FF; as FF will not work without loop-backs, no other application I use uses loop-backs…]?
      Why does FF connect to so many telemetry/marketing/major cloud providers [Amazon Technologies Inc.; Akamai Technologies(23.36.3.169), Inc.; MCI Communications Services, Inc.; Google LLC(34.95.71.207, 172.217.3.206, 216.58.193.68, 216.58.217.35);] firms in a clean install when a profile is enabled (I just ran another clean install; the IPs in brackets were the only ones to wait for connection, though maybe if I removed my existing firewall blocks for those other companies all would try connections again) . Why does FF not host it’s own servers? I don’t like all these connections; Chrome only makes connections to two Google servers by default. I’d trust a single company with my data more than 4 companies, with so many different connections.
      So FF seems far behind chrome…
      Yes, I know Chrome is a branch of Chromium. However in arch pacman there was no Chrome, only Chromium, though their build of Chromium did include most Chrome functionality.
      The only reason I use FF is to help fight Chromium from having a monopoly. Hopefully FF can catch up.

      Reply

  2. happysurf wrote on

    Great work as always.
    When we will see the Library in a new tab instead of the obsolete window?

    Reply

  3. Leonard Ehrenfried wrote on

    What I always wonder when I read those blog posts: what happened to the Web Payments API implementation in Firefox? I while ago I read regular updates but for several month there are no more updates.

    Has it been cancelled?

    Reply

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