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Categories: News

These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 75

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Highlights

  • We’ve added a new section to about:preferences to opt-in to experimental features!
    • Go to about:preferences, and look for “Experiments” on the left-hand side.

    • The Nightly Experiments pane in about:preferences showing several experiments that users can toggle.

      Feeling experimental? Check these options out!

  • Firefox Lockwise (about:logins) now supports Login Export to a .csv file

    • ”Export Logins…” menu item in the menu of about:logins

      Your data is yours – so take your passwords and do what you will with them.

  • There’s a new WebRTC global sharing indicator enabled on Nightly!

    • The new WebRTC global sharing indicator in Nightly. The indicator shows that the user is sharing their microphone, camera and a Nightly window.

      This indicator can be dragged anywhere on screen and minimized, and works on all desktop platforms.

    • Noticed any issues? File bugs against this metabug for us to triage.
  • We need more Nightly users to help us test Fission!
    • Original announcement requesting testers on dev-platform
    • The team will soon add Fission to the about:preferences Experiments section, but in the meantime, you can opt-in to trying it by going to about:config and setting fission.autostart to true, and restarting
  • The DevTools team has merged the Messages side panel into the Response side panel (bug) in the Network tool. So, WebSocket frames are now displayed in the Response panel
    • The Network tool showing some WebSocket frames appearing in the Response panel.

Friends of the Firefox team

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

Fixed more than one bug

  • ariasuni
  • Farooq AR
  • Itiel
  • kenrick95
  • Kriyszig
  • Kyle Knaggs
  • manas
  • Mark Smith [:mcs]
  • petcuandrei
  • Richard Sherman :rich :richorrichard
  • Sebastian Zartner [:sebo]
  • Sonia
  • Stepan Stava [:stepan]

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

WebExtensions Framework
WebExtension APIs
  • Fixed regressions:
    • Mak fixed a regression in the downloads API that would make valid downloads to fail (Bug 1637973, originally regressed by Bug 1598216)
    • Rob fixed a regression related to webRequest API listeners ability to modify CSP headers on the requests intercepted (Bug 1635781, regressed by Bug 1462989)
  • Contributions:
    • Starting from Firefox 79, a new browser.tabs.warmup API method is available to the WebExtensions (Bug 1402256). The WebExtensions will be able to use this method to improve user perceived performance on switching between tabs). Thanks to ariasuni for contributing this enhancement!
    • In Firefox 79, browser.tabs.duplicate API method does now ensure that duplicated tabs are created as active, as in Chrome (Bug 1376088). Thanks ariasuni
    • dpk contributed a patch to improve error messages when invalid patterns are used in browser.tabs.query (Bug 1637431)
    • Sonia Singla contributed a patch to not show the WebExtensions contextMenu related to bookmarks on entries without a bookmarkGuid (Bug 1638360)
    • Myeongjun Go contributed a patch to allow localhost’s http urls as search providers defined in a WebExtensions manifest
    • Harsh contributed a patch to allow extensions to observe and modify requests created using the browser.downloads.download API (Bug 1579911)
Addon Manager & about:addons
  • Removed built-in certificate requirement for addon updates and installs when signed extensions are required (Bug 1308251)
  • other issues and/or regressions fixed in AOM and about:addons:
    • error logged when non-extension add-ons or the browser are being updated (Bug 1643854, regressed by Bug 1618500)
    • addon install cancellation ignored when the addon has been already downloaded (Bug 1559683)
    • addon details page not loaded as expected when clicking the add-on title in the about:addons list view (Bug 1645286)
    • missing select dropdown in extensions options_ui page when embedded into a about:addons page (Bug 1647727)

Developer Tools

  • Remote Debugging Added forward, back, and refresh buttons to remote debugging experience (bug)
    • The remote debugging interface showing some back and forward toolbar buttons to the left of the URL input.
  • Console Panel – 4XX and 5XX requests are now displayed as error in the console, and don’t need the Request/XHR filter to be enabled (bug)
    • A 500 Internal Server Error and a 400 Bad Request error appearing by default in the console.
  • Accessibility – Several improvements for a11y contributed by MarcoZ. More parts of the DevTools UI is now accessible to screen readers (bug, bug, bug, bug)
  • Console Panel – Blocked requests have a distinct style in the console (bug)
    • A series of requests being logged in the DevTools console. One of them has a crossed-out icon and different colouring to indicate that it was a blocked request. On the right side, a “Tracking” label has been applied to indicate that the request was blocked due to it being for a tracking script.
  • Debugger Panel – Debugger shows also sources cleaned up by GC (bug)
  • Network Panel – slow requests are marked with a turtle icon. Slow = Waiting for the response from the server is > 500 ms (bug). Default value stored in devtools.netmonitor.audits.slow
    • A series of network requests in the Network panel. Some of them have icons of turtles after the resource name to indicate that the responses returned slowly.
  • Network Panel – support for Server Side Events (SSE) coming in 80. Visualization for text/event-stream content types (bug, test page). Hidden behind a pref: devtools.netmonitor.features.sse
    • A Server Side Event endpoint is showing incoming event data via the Response panel in the Network inspector. The data is a mixture of raw strings (“Hello world”) and JSON.

Fission

Password Manager

PDFs & Printing

Performance

Performance Tools

Remote Protocol (Chrome DevTools Protocol subset)

  • When navigating to web pages with iframes included, all relevant page navigation events are sent out for each and every frame now. To get this finished various other small fixes were necessary too. The formerly added preference remote.frames.enabled is no longer necessary because frame handling is enabled by default now.
  • For the next while, the team will be focused on making Marionette Fission compatible. In the meantime, we’ll be gathering feedback from Puppeteer users and anyone else experimenting with Remote Protocol before we resume our work in that area.

Search and Navigation

Search:

  • Some reliability fixes for modern configuration.
  • Post-modern cleanup is now underway and is currently reworking how the search engine cache and initialization routines are handled.
  • Region detection
    • We’re now experimenting with doing regular checks for your region and updating it if you’ve changed location for more than a couple of weeks (before Region used to be static all the time, unless we explicitly reset it) – Bug 1627555
    • Better support to customize params depending on the region – Bug 1634580
    • Experiment will run in Beta to check reliability

Address Bar:

  • Address bar expansion on focus now obeys prefers-reduced-motion – Bug 1629303
  • On Windows it’s now possible to close the results panel by clicking on the toolbox draggable space – Bug 1628948
  • Fixed a regression where search suggestions were not provided anymore when restricting to search (with “?” or an alias) – Bug 1648385
  • Search suggestions will now be shown for a broader range of search strings (But not when the typed string looks like a url) – Bug 1628079
  • Search history is enabled by default in Firefox 78 and obeys the same preference as normal search suggestions – Bug 1643475
  • Fixed a bug where certain domains (like “pserver”) may be transformed into others when typed and confirmed without a protocol – Bug 1646928
  • A new browser.urlbar.dnsResolveSingleWordsAfterSearch preference allows to disable post-facto DNS resolution of single word searches that may be valid intranet names – Bug 1642943
  • Restriction tokens at the end of the search string are considered only if they are preceded by a space (Searching for “c++” now works correctly) – Bug 1636961
  • Tail search suggestions are enabled in EARLY_BETA_OR_EARLIER; release enabling is pending a Firefox 78 experiment – Bug 1645059 (demo: search for “hobbit holes for sale in i”)

WebRTC UI

One comment on “These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 75”

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  1. Anonymous wrote on

    Nice improvements with password export and SSE in devtools.
    Things I still miss from Firefox is support for the HTML dialog element, the “system-ui” CSS font-family, private fields in ES6 classes, and a “x”/clear button for HTML input type=”search”.

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