These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 76

Highlights

• Call for testing: turn on the devtools.netmonitor.features.sse pref, which provides support for Server Side Events (SSE) ready in 80 and a visualization for text/event-stream content types (bug).
  • Use this test page #1
  • Use this test page #2 (with support for Mercure protocol)

• You can now import CSV files into about:logins to help move your logins around

Import login information, it’s easy!

• The Password Manager doorhanger now shows usernames from all <input>s when prompting you to save a login.

Check out all of your saved usernames!

• Check out a blog post on how we improved Firefox startup time with the about:home startup cache. Enable this by going to about:preferences#experimental and continue filing bugs.
  • Check out this comparison video!
• Console – A new :block command for blocking requests is now available in the Console panel (Thanks to thelehhman).
  • :block app.css

Friends of the Firefox team

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

Fixed more than one bug

• Andrew Park
• Itiel
• kenrick95
• Sonia

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

• Andrew Park made sure we don’t report NaN for an add-on download speed.
• Andrew Park also fixed malformed URLs in the bookmarks folder.
• Harsh improved our error logging in the internal Download API.

• 🌟DH Kim made the style of the disabled-paused button clearer

• 🌟Kanishk removed test cases from SearchService.idl
• Kyle Knaggs ensured the context menu items in the Editor copy the expected text to the clipboard
• Stanislav Goncharov made sure the autocomplete list events are not propogated to filter input 
• 🌟Anwesha made nodeFront calls smarter

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

Addon Manager & about:addons

• Share fixed a couple of issues that were preventing addons from being installed or updated when the builtin cert was not being used (which is the case for some organizations that use their own certificates, or because of some antivirus that install its own certificate to inspect HTTPS connections) – Bug 1647360 and Bug 1648815
• Will Durand made sure that the sourceURL in the addon abuse reports submitted by users will be set to the expected source url even when the website did change it using the history API – Bug 1648036
• Andrew Park contributed a fix that prevents the addon download doorhanger to show “NaN bytes/sec” when the download starts – Bug 1544570

WebExtensions Framework

• Agi fixed a perf issue related to main thread I/O on startup when the rkv-based ExtensionPermissions backend is in use (only Nightly at the moment) – Bug 1651628 (main thread I/O originally introduced in Bug 1637680)
• Landed an initial part of the changes needed to support Extension’s service workers and the manifest v3 background service workers (locked behind prefs “extensions.backgroundServiceWorker.enabled” and “extensions.service_worker_register.allowed”, currently both false by default on all channels) – Bug 1609920 (as a side note: even when enabled using the supported prefs no WebExtensions API are yet available in the Extension’s service workers)

WebExtension APIs

• Rob fixed the validation of the chrome_settings_override’s search_url/suggest_url/search_form, which was allowing more than just localhost urls in those manifest properties – Bug 1651665 (landed in 80 and pending an uplift request to 79, where the originally regression landed, Bug 1612013)
• Harsh Arora contributed a small fix to ensure that the downloads.download API is going to log in the BrowserConsole unexpected errors raised internally when a download fails – Bug 1645337 (originally regressed by Bug 1576333)

Applications

Push

• We’ve identified a reliability issue with Send Tab. The fix is in review now, and will be likely deployed with the 7/28 release.

Developer Tools

• Layout & Mobile Tools – XPath search now supports more expressions—previously, only expressions starting with a “/” were recognized.
  • Check this bug for more details (thanks to Sebo!)

• Infrastructure improvements

• • Getting rid of message manager & framescript (thanks to Neil Deakin, bug, bug, bug, bug)
  • Codebase cleanup – removing old RDM UI (frame script, browser element, viewport, etc.)

Fission

• Making progress with a unified Resource layer. Good progress on DevTools client side and starting also with the backend (server side).
• Individual DevTools panels/tools  “watch” for specific resource types (console message, network request, debugger source, etc.) and get them from all debugged scopes automatically (content & main processes, workers, etc.)

Password Manager

• Show/adjust the dismissed login capture doorhanger in response to input events in the password & username field
• Thanks to Kenrick for fixing a number of about:logins issues!

Performance

• Gijs built this really cool Treemap visualization to get a sense of the distribution of DOM nodes in browser.xhtml
  • (Right-click zooms out)
  • #mainPopupSet is pretty big! That’s why we’re boiling down the panels.
• emalysz is putting together a patch that will help us defer more work to after the initial about:home has painted
  • Also debugged a ts_paint_webext regression
• Gijs and emalysz made more of our panels lazier to reduce the initial size of the browser.xhtml DOM
• Gijs landed a new test to measure how many DOM nodes are in the initial browser.xhtml document to help track fluctuations and prevent bloat
  • This is a new kind of performance test – mozperftest.
• Gijs is chasing down a ts_paint_webext regression
• bigiri and Gijs are working on improving our slow script notification experience, starting with measurement
• dthayer advanced Nightly to Stage 3 of FastShutdown!
• dthayer made it so that we cache more things in startupcache – this should have a really nice impact on Beta and Release
  • Less of an impact on Nightly because the startupcache is invalidated when the buildIDs get bumped, which is twice daily for Nightly

Picture-in-Picture

• Planning has begun to do some experiments regarding improved discoverability of the Picture-in-Picture toggle

User Journey

• Launched about:welcome experiment in 78 with 2 screens (welcome and import)
  • Also testing new Amplitude integration and comparing with Redash
• Adding additional experimental welcome screens for privacy and themes
• Preparing some new default 80 welcome experience based on multistage findings
• Turning on password import autocomplete suggestions by default in 80 with additional robustness over 77 experiment functionality (accessibility, localization)

WebRTC UI

• The goal is to ship the new indicator with DOM notification silencing in Firefox 80. Found any bugs? Here’s a form to file bugs in the right spot.
• Fixed
  • Bug 1650243 – When muting / unmuting devices on some calls, the minimized indicator restores itself
  • Bug 1646958 – The text on the Global Sharing Overlay (when sharing screen) is not displayed correctly when in high contrast on Windows/dark theme on Linux
• In Progress
  • Bug 1652466 – Add an about:config pref to suppress the global sharing indicator
  • Bug 1649032 – If the user closes the WebRTC sharing indicator, all streams should close
  • Bug 1637791 – Show a highlight around any windows shared over WebRTC, or around the edge of the screen when sharing a screen.