These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 77

Highlights

• Firefox for Android updates:
  • Edit logins is now available on Nightly, let us know if you find bugs 👀!
  • Swipe to switch tab gestures are now on Nightly as well!
• We’re working on moving the print / print preview to be a tab modal dialog
  • Meta bug
  • Mock-ups
  • Targeting 81, hoping to turn it on in Nightly as an experiment or entirely within a week
  • Currently we have some print settings which are mostly functional bug with some bugs we need to work out. Modal and preview coming soon
  • Enable by setting print.tab_modal.enabled to true
• dthayer has moved Nightly to Stage 3 of FastShutdown

  • 

    Shutdown is getting faster!

• emalysz has made more panels lazy

  • 

    Window opening is getting faster, too!

Friends of the Firefox team

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

Fixed more than one bug

• Farooq AR
• Itiel

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

• Alex J Garcia fixed a panel resize bug in the DevTools debugger

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

Addon Manager & about:addons

• Shane worked on some AOM changes needed to allow Firefox to “stage install” langpacks for app updates (Bug 1639705, Bug 1648214, Bug 1648818)

WebExtensions Framework

• Fixed an issue that was preventing Firefox from fully unregister extensions that did fail early during their startup (Bug 1651844)

WebExtension APIs

• dw-dev contributed a fix to the downloads API to ensure that the ‘Save As’ dialog will use a file filter derived from the filename set by the extension in the download API call (Bug 1651175). Thanks to dw-dev for contributing this nice enhancement!
• Fixed a regression on the downloads API when used in private browsing mode on an extension-created blob url (originally introduced in Firefox 79 by Bug 1579911), the fix has been uplifted to Firefox 79 (Bug 1649463)

Fission

• Background page thumbnailer is now fission compatible
• Only four bugs left in milestone 6a, three have patches.

Lint

• Upgraded ESLint to 7.5.0 (from 6.8.0). As a result in-tree ESLint now has support for globalThis. We also have several new rules enabled by default:
  • no-dupe-else-if
  • no-import-assign (relevant to ES Modules)
  • no-setter-return

Password Manager

• Dismissed login capture doorhanger does not show when password field is edited and in its own Shadow Root
• Password Manager code does not run when DOMInputPasswordAdded occurs between DOMContentLoaded and load events
• Replace all user-facing instances that refer to “master” password
  • Add Primary Password SUMO link and text about the name change
  • Rename MasterPassword policy to PrimaryPassword policy
• Automatically restore from logins-backup.json when logins.json is missing or corrupt
• Hold CSV Import to Nightly for Fx80
• [Doorhanger V2] Show all base domain logins in doorhanger and a bunch of related doorhanger follow-ups

Performance

• bigiri is fixing the last few dozen failing tests with porting ASRouter to JSWindowActors
• The DLL prefetch experiment is still underway. The team hopes to have a sense of the impact on user startup times after we’ve collected more data.
• Gijs has landed probes for the slow script notification warnings
• Another shoutout to the IOUtils module by keefer!
  • Still somewhat in early stages, but usable enough to do OMT reading, writing and stating of files!
  • Organizing document

Performance Tools

• Changed the profiler UI to use sample counts, and added explicit support for traced profiles.

  • 

    This is a much more accurate representation, since the sampling interval is not guaranteed to run consistently – especially for machines under load.

• Renamed IPC message tooltip labels to be more descriptive.
  IPC Speed -> IPC Send Duration
  IPC Latency -> IPC Recv Latency
• Started to use the appropriate time unit in the marker chart.

  • 

    For really short intervals, using μs (microseconds) rather than ms (milliseconds) makes a lot of sense.

Picture-in-Picture

• Recently landed patches to experiment with new toggle variations and placement
• Glitch prototype
• Toggle experiment preferences:
  • media.videocontrols.picture-in-picture.video-toggle.mode
    • Default = -1
    • Mode 1 = 1
    • Mode 2 = 2
  • media.videocontrols.picture-in-picture.video-toggle.position
    • “right” = right side (default)
    • “left” = left side
  • media.videocontrols.picture-in-picture.video-toggle.has-used (only affects Mode 2)
    • true – the user has used Picture-in-Picture before in 80+
    • false (default) – the user has not used Picture-in-Picture before in 80+

Search and Navigation

Search

• Reliability and clean-up fixes to modern configuration and region detection
• Region.jsm is now documented

Address Bar

• Tail search suggestions have been enabled for release in Firefox 80 – Bug 1653085
• Resolved a bug causing some characters to be dropped when typing fast – Bug 1653436
• Resolved a bug where autofill may not happen for some bookmarked origins – Bug 1654316
• The work on design update2 started, but it’s not yet ready for Nightly testing. You can check the proposed non-definitive designs: one-off-shortcuts, tab-to-search

User Journey

• Showing locale/geo-matching default sites on about:welcome matching about:newtab
• Preparing multistage welcome experiment analysis of v1/78 and starting v2/79
• Improving some multistage about:welcome accessibility (hover-only text) and localization (multiline “zap” style) issues
• Supporting “One Scene Send-to-Device” snippet template for mobile, e.g., Fenix

WebRTC UI

• Holding the new WebRTC global sharing indicator to Nightly for now while we sort out default placement.
• We’re going to ship it on in an experiment in Firefox 80 on release to get a sense of how it’s being used in the wild