Categories: News

These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 67

Highlights

Friends of the Firefox team

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

Fixed more than one bug

  • Dennis van der Schagt [:dennisschagt]
  • Florens Verschelde :fvsch
  • Itiel
  • Logan Smyth [:loganfsmyth]
  • Marco Vega
  • Sorin Davidoi

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

Project Updates

Accessibility

Add-ons / Web Extensions

Developer Tools

Console
  • Console settings menu (Bug 1523868), see the next screenshot. Contributed by Armando
    • The Console developer tool shows a menupopup beneath a settings button, giving the user the ability to Persist Logs, Show Timestamps and Group Similar Messages.

      We’ve tucked additional capabilities for the Console inside of this gear menu.

  • Scratchpad is deprecated and will be removed/replaced by Editor mode in the Console panel. The only missing thing blocking the removal is adding load/save buttons in Browser Console Editor Toolbar (bug 1584259) See the next screenshot
    • The Scratchpad Developer Tool toggle in the Developer Tools Settings menu shows a warning saying that Scratchpad is deprecated.

      Pour one out for Scratchpad – thank you for your years of service!

  • Jump to definition button (displayed next to  functions) should now properly handle sourcemap (Bug 1433373), thanks to mattheww
Network
  • The Waterfall column (aka Timeline) hides automatically when a side bar is opened (bug)
Layout
  • Whitespace text nodes are now displayed with a “whitespace” badge in the markup view (bug). Thanks to thomas.jean.lynch for the patch! See the `whitespace` badges on the next screenshot.
    • The Inspector Developer Tool showing whitespace nodes with a clearly labeled "whitespace" marker.

      This should make it clearer to identify when there’s whitespace in your mark-up that might be affecting the page.

Fission
  • Most of the team is focusing on Fission and we are working towards our first milestone that should be finished in December. The focus is on the Browser Toolbox we call Omniscient.
  • List of preferences related to the Fission work is available through a toolbar FIS button.
    • A "FIS" menu inside of the Browser Toolbox lists a number of important Fission-related preferences and what their values are set to.

Fission

  • Autocomplete and password manager now work in fission. Many related tests have been re-enabled. 🎉🎉🎉
  • Abdoulaye has finished fullscreen video support. 🎉🎉🎉
  • Talos tests now run to completion with Fission enabled
  • The following components are being ported to JSWindowActors by MSU capstone students:
    • PageStyle port is functioning with Fission enabled, just need to hammer out a final bug before landing
    • ShieldFrame port is being reviewed
    • PageThumbs is inching closer to completion, just one test failure remaining
    • UITour port is beginning
    • PopupBlocking port still in early phases, but the notification bar now appears
    • PictureInPicture works with JSWindowActors, but appears to be broken in oop-iframes. Currently investigating.

Mobile

Mobile Browsers
  • Firefox Account login can now be accessed directly from Firefox for Android’s Awesomescreen. Bug 1570880
Mobile Applications
  • Lockwise for Android v3.0.0 was released as part of the Skyline release packet. Features include updating and deleting of credentials, and capturing from autofilled pages and apps (including in Firefox Preview!).

Password Manager

 

 

 

Performance

Performance Tools

  • The checkbox to enable “No Periodic Sampling” mode has landed in mozilla-central today, will be available in the next Nightly. That will help users by capturing only markers and reducing the profiler overhead.
  • We are working on some cool stuff like:

Picture-in-Picture

  • Plan continues to be to do a slow roll-out of Picture-in-Picture to our Windows users in Firefox 71 Release.
  • Fixed:
    • Bug 1585769 – Attempting to open some videos in the Picture-in-Picture player results in an all-white player window and SecurityError: The operation is insecure error
    • Bug 1568373 – Picture in Picture should have a black background
    • Bug 1587362 – PiP button doesn’t work after putting tab back in window
  • Next:
    • Bug 1568316 – Picture-in-Picture window is missing the OS drop shadow
    • Bug 1589158 – Add in-tree documentation for Picture-in-Picture component
    • Begin working on macOS support, tentatively aiming to have that done for Firefox 72
    • Have QA begin testing macOS and Linux support for a potential Firefox 72 release

Privacy/Security

Search and Navigation

Search
  • Separate search engine for private browsing (Firefox 71)
    • Enabled by default in Nightly and early Beta (can be controlled through the temporary feature pref browser.search.separatePrivateDefault.ui.enabled).
    • When you report bugs, please make them block Bug 1411340.
    • It is now possible to enable Search suggestions also for private windows from about:preferences#search.
    • It is possible to directly run a search in a private window from a normal window (with the private search engine, if set) from the content contextual menu, the urlbar, the command line.
    • The feature discovery banner in about:privatebrowsing for now has been disabled (pending a future different design).
  • Search configuration modernization (Firefox 72)
    • No updates, team moving back to this project
Address Bar

User Journey

One comment on “These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 67”

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  1. me wrote on

    As far as I see, it’s not “devtools.netmonitor.features.resourceBlocking”, but “devtools.netmonitor.features.requestBlocking” (boolean).

    Reply

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