These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 78

Highlights

• The tab modal print UI work is still in full swing, and is aiming for Firefox 81.

• A new and colorful “Alpenglow” theme is included in Firefox 81, and is available from about:addons, about:welcome and the Customize UI.

• Address bar Design Update 2 is enabled in Nightly, including search mode. Search mode unifies search engine one-offs and @aliases.

Friends of the Firefox team

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

Fixed more than one bug

• Kriyszig
• manas

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

• 🌟 aichi.p.chang fixed an issue with how we were passing parameters to observers in our region-detecting code.
• 🌟 codywelsh improved the grid layout in DevTools fission preferences.
• Duncangleeddean upgraded eslint-plugin-jest.
• Luc4leone added an option to the debugger editor context menu for the user to be able to wrap / unwrap long lines.
• Nikhilkumar.c16 swapped the collapse and block icons for blocked network messages in the DevTools Console.

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

WebExtensions Framework

• Fixed a regression related to the extensions messaging API (regressed in Bug 1649477 and fixed in Bug 1655624, and a new regression tests added in Bug 1659074)

WebExtension APIs

• Fixed a regression on the downloads.download API, which was excluding non-first party cookies in the requests triggered by the downloads.download API if the extensions do not have explicit host permissions (regressed in Bug 1437626 and fixed in Bug 1655190)
• Thanks to Tim Giles, Firefox will now be showing in about:preferences if an extension is controlling the password saving pref by using the privacy.services.passwordSavingEnabled API (Bug 1620753)

Developer Tools

• Our top priorities for the next while are Fission compatibility, both for DevTools and Marionette (which is powers internal and third-party browser testing tools)

Fission

• A slightly re-organized about:processes is coming:

Installer & Updater

• Bug 1647422 – Profile Counter Telemetry
  • Although there is an existing profile count metric, this new metric counts across OS users and across reinstallations.
  • Implemented as a scalar: browser.engagement.profile_count
• Bug 1647443 – Langpack Updates
  • Users who are working with langpacks see their Firefox version flip back to the English with each update because the langpack hasn’t been updated yet.
  • At the start of patch download, we now call the add-ons manager to start the langpack update process. We then defer signalling that the update is ready until the language packs are staged.
• Bug 1639067 – Downloadable Filetype Improvements
  • Similar to the work done to allow users opening PDFs to do so in Firefox, we’re adding to the list of file types that we’ll allow you to open with Firefox after downloading them. We’ll now support users who want to open .xml, .avif, .svg, and .webp files in Firefox in addition to .pdfs.

Lint

• Sonia Singla has continued work to enable all rules on toolkit/**/*.xhtml files. Will hopefully be completed this week.
• Also thanks to Duncan Dean for fixing ESLint errors in devtools when eslint-plugin-jest was upgraded.

New Tab Page

• Working on turning newtab Pocket stories on in new regions.
  • English stories for en-US/en-GB browsers in Ireland and India.
  • Creating a generic English story feed to turn use for en-US globally.
  • German stories for de browsers in Austria, Switzerland, and Belgium.
• We’ll be running an experiment to show the default browser notification toolbar on the New Tab Page.

Password Manager

• Lots of fixes!
  • about:protections doesn’t show breached logins if Primary Password is enabled but unlocked
  • [Dark Theme] Hover feedback is missing in the autocomplete dropdown
  • Indicate to the user when privacy.services.passwordSavingEnabled has set a new value via an extension
  • about:logins – if logins list full, scrollbar overlaps with bottom separator
  • The Password Import Autocomplete suggestion is displayed on Linux
  • Match base domains (eTLD+1) instead of origin for formActionOrigin
  • Enable password import suggestions by default and remove pref-experimental code
  • Localize password import source-browser name
  • [Doorhanger V2] update doorhanger edit telemetry to account for autocomplete
  • Password Generation key icon is no longer blue after generating a password in a form with a confirm password field
  • Primary password prompt needs to be cancelled twice after restart
  • [Doorhanger V2] pref Doorhanger V2 on in non-Nightly

Performance

• bigiri has cleared out all of the unit test failures for the ASRouter work, has the about:newtab devtools working, and is now working through mochitest failures.
• emalysz has lazified the main appmenu panel, and has patches up to lazify the page action menu.
• dthayer is experimenting with a way of getting a faster first paint experience on Windows, drawing a skeleton of the browser window before XUL has even loaded.
  • Demo video. Disabled state, for reference.
• mconley is working on an easier way for front-end developers to add BHR hang annotations.
• A reminder that the JS Allocations and Native Allocations settings inside of the Profiler can be used to help detect memory leaks / bloat. This can be useful when about:memory isn’t being particularly forthcoming.

Performance Tools

• Added experimental event delay tracks. They are disabled by default, you need to enable it from the devtools console by calling `experimental.enableEventDelayTracks()`. Example profile
  
• Added an “Uploaded recordings” page to see your previously uploaded profiles: https://profiler.firefox.com/uploaded-recordings/ More features will be added, like deleting uploaded profiles.

Picture-in-Picture

• Picture-in-Picture should now be compatible with out-of-process iframes
• We’ll be testing some variations on toggle appearance and positioning in Firefox 81.
• User Research is compiling a report based on a week of user studies on the Picture-in-Picture feature. We hope to use this to better inform our future investment in the feature.

Search and Navigation

Search

• Work is resuming on removing the legacy search configuration from the search service. After that we’ll be fixing some larger architectural type issues to get the search service in a better place for future development.
• There are various bug fixes and improvements to search @alias handling and work on migrating smart keyword bookmarks to search engines alongside user definable engines

User Journey

• Enabled password import suggestion by default in 81 including existing users
  • Allowing opt-out or auto-disable after 3 impressions
• Ability to trigger messages based on the number of times the user has restarted

WebRTC UI

• We’re testing a default placement of the indicator, where it’s placed at the top-center of the last browser that spawned it
• mconley has patches up that update the mic/camera buttons in the new indicator to do global muting

• The new indicator is sticking to Nightly while we continue to refine the UX.