These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 67

Highlights

• Happy release day! Firefox 70 goes out to users today, full of all sorts of goodies. Blog post.
  • Check out this blog post from the Privacy and Security team on some of the new ways that we’re protecting our users
  • This also improves power usage on macOS! Check out this blog post from the Graphics team for technical details
• Enhanced Tracking Protection is now enabled by default in Firefox for Android and GeckoView-powered apps like Firefox Preview.
• Support for inspecting extensions storage.local data from the DevTools storage panel is now enabled by default on all channels, Firefox 70 is the first version to officially support it. Thanks to Bianca Danforth for implementing this!
• Finally, after 2 years of effort, the last XBL binding was removed from mozilla-central! XBL is a non-standard technology that Firefox used to bind script to custom widgets. We have replaced many of these with Web Components and Custom Elements
  • More details in the special newsletter post

    • 

      The end of an era! Onwards and upwards.

  • And then a follow up XUL/XBL Replacement Newsletter #18
  • We’ve also landed code to disable XBL support in-tree!
• We now have a readability backplate for high-contrast mode allowing us to enable background images in High Contrast Mode.
  • 

    The readability backplate is being used in the example at the bottom. This is much more readable.
• Numerous improvements to the Network Monitor’s networking blocking feature. This feature is available in Nightly behind a pref (QA testing currently in progress) devtools.netmonitor.features.resourceBlocking

  • 

    The request in red was blocked, and the Network Monitor can show you why.

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)

• 🌟 Alessandro [:aka84] made it so that our DevTools en-US strings use Title Case across the board
• 🌟 Marco Vega fixed an alignment issue in the pretty-printing progress indicator and made sure that pressing Esc closes the Style Editor autocomplete popup, both in our DevTools code
• 🌟 Mustafa made it so that the Timings column in the Network Monitor DevTool hides when opening up the sidebar (since the sidebar also has a Timings pane)
• 🌟 Mellina Yonashiro enabled ESLint so that it runs in devtools/client/storage/test
• Zhao Gang made it so that the Debugger is better at highlighting the current line of execution when viewing a prettified source file

Project Updates

Accessibility

• Reader View availability is now announced to screen readers. Before, screen reader users had to guess if a page was available in Reader View
• Toolbar badging is now accessible to screen reader users.
• optgroups in select controls now read properly for screen reader users.
• A fix corrected the accessibility exposure for the menu element.
• A fix landed for form autofill results being read twice to screen reader users.

Add-ons / Web Extensions

• Mark added a link to a SUMO page in the addon options menu for addons that can’t be uninstalled (which provides more information to the users that may want to manually remove the extension from their system)
  

  In this case, the system administrator had installed the add-on.
• Shane fixed a bug that was making Firefox to wrongly restore the old default values of the prefs controlled by the extensions (instead of the new default value expected on the current Firefox version)
• Luca fixed a downloads API regression that was preventing the extension from receiving the downloads.onCreated even for downloads with a referrer property, and uplifted the fix to Firefox 70.
• Rob fixed a small UI regression on the notification triggered by extensions
• Tomislav is tirelessly fixing and re-enabling WebExtensions and Addon Manager tests that were still skipped on Fission (Bugzilla issues: 1589885, 1589481, 1589266, 1589508, 1589110, 1588390, 1588338, 1587914, 1587971, 1587633, 1587221, 1578420)
• Second part of the changes needed to hand-off AMO abuse reports to Firefox integrated abuse report panel has been landed on Firefox 71 (locked behind a pref), and the AMO team is now starting to work on integrating the new API available.
• Paul fixed a regression that was preventing a user to install addons when Firefox is in the “maximized fullscreen” mode supported on MacOS (where the Firefox can be in fullscreen but still showing the Firefox UI)

Developer Tools

Console

• Console settings menu (Bug 1523868), see the next screenshot. Contributed by Armando

  • 

    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

  • 

    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.

  • 

    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.
  • 

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

• Removed insecure password field detection code for the address bar.
• Fission: Thanks to Neil for landing a big series to make password manager work with Fission. We have also been working on test changes and fixing intermittent failures.
• eTLD+1/Subdomain login suggestions: Enabled to ride the trains for Fx71 after some fixes. Last optional fix was to make it more clear which logins are for the same domain.
• Desktop management: Now that we’re well into Fx71 development, we’ve a number of tweaks to the about:logins user experience, along with a couple of enhancements like The “No Logins” screen should offer importing logins from another browser on supporting OS underway. If you still have the Lockwise desktop extension installed, please uninstall it since it’s now unsupported with the shipping of about:logins in Fx70.

Performance

• Here’s a recent comparison between base and Fission
• Team has completed Talos and Mochi responsiveness tests audit. We’ve got a metabug for regressions / unrealistic improvements we’ve detected, as well as for tests that need updating
  • Next steps are to update the tests to be more relevant when Fission is enabled (make sure they exercise oop iframes), and to investigate some of the anomalies in our measurements
• mconley did some frame recording analysis, and it appears that Fission has no discernible impact on cold start time
• mconley also added an –enable-fission argument to ./mach talos-test to run Talos tests locally with Fission enabled
• emalysz has work-in-progress patches up to:
  • Optimize sandbox policy construction, which should help improve content process launch times
  • Move more OS and CPU information gathering in nsSystemInfo off of the main thread, and into a lazy task instead
• Gijs has patches up for review to stop scanning for Flash synchronously at startup
• squib has a patch up for review to make about:home / about:newtab more efficient in how it queries for search information when doing the hand-off to the AwesomeBar
•  dthayer changed our StartupCache code to use lz4 compression instead. We expect this to improve startup times for users that haven’t just received an update (which is the common case on Beta and Release).
  • ~5% median startup improvement on Nightly. Looking forward to analyzing impact on Beta and Release.

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:
  • Reducing the overhead of responsiveness data and visualizing event delay(example profile with deploy preview):

    • 

      The saw-tooth patterns are showing that responsiveness of the event loop is changing quite a bit in this process.

  • Squib is very close to landing IPC markers inside a new track(example profile with deploy preview):

    • 

      This will make it easier to detect inter-process communication, which will help browser engineers understand how the browser is behaving and whether it’s working efficiently.

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

• Paul is working on isolating permissions by Origin Attributes

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

• Regression fixes:
  • Address Bar dropdown may show invalid characters for entries with tags
• Visual redesign (aka “megabar”, Firefox 72)
  • Started implementing a new revision of the design, with the field not covering adjacent toolbar items.
  • Working closely with UX. Focus is on making easier to search and better separation of concerns.
  • Stability and smoothness fixes.
• Search Interventions experiment (Firefox 72)
  • Accessibility and stability fixes.
  • Work on the experimental add-on starting.

User Journey

• Feature complete for off-train message l10n for user messaging
  • It uses a remote up to date asrouter.ftl file from RS falling back to the local version to allow localized remotely deployed recommendations
• Display a toast for reaching tracking blocked milestones
• Randomly pick one of 6 about:welcome variants for modal/less and messaging experiments