These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 73

Highlights

• Picture-in-Picture now works across workspaces on macOS! (bug)

• Firefox now alerts users regarding vulnerable passwords. Bug 1626107 enables this feature after many bug fixes and UI tweaks!

  

  Firefox keeping you and your accounts safe from hackers!

• Visual redesign of the URL bar has shipped to release! Found a bug? File it here!

• Firefox Profiler now has a button to re-symbolicate a profile

  

  An excellent quality of life improvement for profiler power-users

• Maja added Firefox Nightly support to Google Puppeteer’s browser-fetching feature. This means that as of v3, Puppeteer users will have an equally convenient install+launch+connect flow for both Firefox and Chrome.

Friends of the Firefox team

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

Fixed more than one bug

• aarushivij

• Artem

  • One of our MSU Capstone students!

• Itiel

• Jayati Shrivastava

• Kriyszig

• Tim Nguyen :ntim

New contributors ( = first patch)

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

WebExtensions Framework

• A new profiler marker includes information about the webRequest blocking handlers registered by extensions (Bug 1625006), Thanks to Andrew Swan for contributing this new useful information to the Firefox profiler!

  

  Handy for understanding how webRequest handlers affect Firefox performance

WebExtension APIs

• Fixed a bug that was preventing extensions to be able to intercept (and eventually block) web requests related to subresources loaded by file:// pages (Bug 1621935)

• Contributions:

  • theme API bug (Bug 1585290). Thanks to myeongjun.ko for contributing this fix.

Addon Manager & about:addons

• The about:addons HTML rewrite is almost completed, the about:addons categories sidebar was the last UI component still provided by about:addons XUL page (Bug 1525178 and follow-ups fixes Bug 1626378 and Bug 1559392)

• Mark also fixed an issue when about:addons is in dark mode (Bug 1626426 – [about:addons] Page is white while loading in dark mode) and a fluent-related regression (Bug 1626937 – Check for Updates in Add-ons doesn’t show status messages, regressed in Bug 1617669)

• Contributions:

  • Bug 1596858 – Different spacing above “Enabled” and “Disabled” headers when there is no enabled add-on (fixed by aarushivij, Thanks a lot to our new contributor!)

  • Bug 1624585 – Fix blurry extension icons (fixed by ntim, regressed by Bug 1421039)

  • Bug 1592324 – Always show a button to go to AMO in extension/theme list views (contributor by Jayati Shrivastava)

Developer Tools

• Console panel groups sameSite cookies warnings (bug)

  

  Get out of here, clutter!

• Network panel indicating lazy loaded resources (bug)

  

  Lazy is good

• Updating DevTools documentation (link)

  

  Contributors very welcome

• WebSocket Inspector allows hiding control frames (bug)

  

  Control what you see

• DevTools Fission Refactoring

  • RDM Fission refactoring done (one QA reported bug WIP)

    • Re-building the RDM user interface so it doesn’t rely on <iframe mozbrowser>

• • HTML element highlighter refactoring

    • New architecture that works across processes

  • TargetList API

    • Support for navigation between different domains/processes

    • Connecting to all targets (top level document + embedded iframes) early

  • Resource API

    • Unified format for all data fetched from debugged pages

  • JS Execution Context Selector

    • Unified UI for implicit/explicit context switching in Console and Debugger.

      

      Don’t let the console take what you write out of context

Fission

• Coming soonish – JSContentActors. These are to process scripts as JSWindowActors were to frame scripts

  • One caveat: I believe a JSContentActorChild can’t be created for the parent process

• Even more process switching logic moving out of SessionStore

• Neil fixed an issue with the master password when Fission is enabled

Password Manager

• Password generation: New model (v2) landed with a much better conversion rate (comparable to without Fathom) while showing ~5x more often! Main focus now is on improving performance and accuracy (especially in certain locales/countries). Let us know if you see false-positives in 76+. The password manager now treats former type=password fields as password fields in order to handle sites that implement their own password reveal toggles.

• Dismissed login capture doorhanger: Fixed the 2 remaining blockers before the merge. Two follow-ups to uplift shortly.

• Old Password Management UI: Severin has a patch to remove this from Firefox now that about:logins has shipped since 70.

• OS re-auth for about:logins: Discussing with MSFT about a Win10 usability issue that the OS password is sometimes required and Windows Hello options aren’t offered. We will watch feedback on beta to see how the feature is received overall.

  

  Speak friend and enter

Performance

• bigiri is making inroads into splitting the Snippets code from ASRouter so that it runs entirely in the child process

• dthayer has built a ProcMon report visualization tool to help us get a different view of what Firefox does during startup on Windows (example firefox startup recording)

• dthayer is looking at ways we can reuse more of the startupcache across different threads to reduce IO

• emalysz fixed a regression that would cause crashed pinned tabs to lose all of their session history

• emalysz is also working to get rid of some needless disk reads during startup

• Gijs got the blocklist enabled in Talos! This makes our Talos startup tests more realistic.

  • This was pretty tricky due to a bug in how RemoteSettings shuts down

• Gijs is looking to move the startupcache write to a background thread

• Gijs has been consulting on the recent rewrite of nsDefaultURIFixup in JS

• mconley is continuing work on the about:home startup cache

  • Patches up to enable the privileged about content process on all channels

  • Landed moz-page-thumb:// support for the privileged about content process

  • Posted a patch to make Pocket story images use declarative responsive image techniques, rather than using layout flushing stuff that can’t be used when generating the cache

  • Posted a patch to less aggressively ask the parent for the initial Redux state if the about:newtab / about:home page is not visible

  • Posted initial version of about:home startup cache writer

  • Landed a patch that gets rid of an unload event handler for about:home / about:newtab when using the privileged about content process

• mconley also fixed a bug where an audio-wakelock wasn’t getting created for WebAudio contexts

  • This meant that background tabs with WebAudio on Windows could have their process priority downgraded, resulting in degraded audio

Performance Tools

• Panel sidebar is shown by default now.

  

  Let the sidebar be your sidekick

• Started to show the full backtrace of a marker in the sidebar.

• Added a context menu for the markers in the timeline.

  

  Great for filtering down to just what you care about!

Picture-in-Picture

• Fixed

  • Bug 1622919 – Picture-in-Picture toggle should re-evaluate visibility on video duration change

    • This makes the toggle appear more reliably on streaming news sites

  • Bug 1624702 – Write a Picture-in-Picture toggle behaviour test for the durationchange event

Remote Protocol (Chrome DevTools Protocol subset)

• We can now run WordPress Gutenberg end-to-end tests against Firefox Nightly and we pass 52% of all the tests out of the box. To reach that status a fair amount of work has been done over the last couple of months.

• Henrik landed several fixes and enhancements for both the Runtime.evaluate and Runtime.callFunctionOn API’s.

• Henrik added basic implementations for DOM.describeNode and DOM.resolveNode.

Search and Navigation

Search

• Continuing to work towards shipping modern search engine configuration.

• Work is starting on improving our region detection code and centralising the code that is used by various consumers of the region.

Address Bar

• Visual redesign

  • Minor tweaks landed for high contrast mode and dark theme

  • Minor fixes for tips and interventions

• Make Address Bar modules more easily reusable by other projects

  • Work continues, nothing major to report

• Address Bar results composition improvements

  • Busy with code refactorings and planning for a new frecency algorithm