These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 79

Highlights

• We’re testing some variations on the Picture-in-Picture toggle
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    An animated GIF shows a Picture-in-Picture toggle being moused over. When the mouse reaches the toggle, it extends, showing the text “Watch in Picture-in-Picture”

    

    An animated GIF shows a Picture-in-Picture toggle being moused over. Text describing Picture-is-Picture is shown.

• Camera and microphone global mutes have landed, but are being held to Nightly

  • 

    The WebRTC sharing indicator shows microphone, camera, and minimize buttons. The microphone button shows that it is muted.

• Urlbar Design Update 2 is live in Nightly. Access “search mode” from the refresh one-off buttons, including one-offs for bookmarks, history, and tabs. This feature is targeting 82. Please file bugs against Bug 1644572!

Friends of the Firefox team

Introductions/Shout-Outs

• Welcome mtigley and daisuke to the Firefox Desktop team!

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

Fixed more than one bug

• manas

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

Addon Manager & about:addons

• Shane landed a patch to make sure that Firefox will double-check the version compatibility for the installed langpacks and disable them if they are not strictly compatible with the currently running Firefox version (Bug 1646016), this was likely a major cause for some YSOD (yellow screen of death) issues that were originally triggered by an issue on the AMO side.

WebExtensions Framework

• Matt Woodrow fixed a webRequest API regression which was preventing pages multipart/x-mixed-replace content to finish loading when extensions using webRequest blocking listeners are installed (e.g. uBlock origin) (Fixed in Bug 1638422, originally regressed by Bug 1600211)

WebExtensions API

• As part of fission-related work on the extensions framework and APIs, Tomislav landed some changes needed to make the browser.tabs.captureTab API method to work with Fission iframes (Bug 1636508)

Applications

Sync and Storage

• 98% of our sync storage nodes have been migrated over to the new Rust based sync storage service, aka “Durable Sync”.
• JR Conlin is working on implementing a sync quota; we’ll limit users to 2GB per sync collection (ie, bookmarks, tabs, history, etc) and plan to roll this out in late September.

Fission

• Fission Nightly experiment is tentatively targeted for Nightly 83

Installer & Updater

• Mhowell and Nalexander are researching how to move forward with a Gecko based background update agent. Work will continue on this effort through the end of the year.
• Bytesized has a patch open to add telemetry to track windows verified app settings to help us better understand barriers to installation for Win10 users.

Lint

• Sonia has continued work on enabling rules that were previously disabled when *.xul files moved to *.xhtml, with toolkit and accessible landing in the last week.

Password Manager

• sfoster is nominated as submodule owner
• Bianca Danforth and Severin Rudie are nominated as peers
• Ensure formLike.rootElement correctly points to the nearest HTMLFormElement ancestor, if any, when a password field is inside a ShadowRoot
• The PP prompt is displayed multiple times after dismissing the prompt twice on a form (on page load and form submit) if there are previously saved logins
• Please create the new collection “password-recipes”
• Option to save logins does not keep state in private mode

PDFs & Printing

• Beta uplifts are complete as of Thursday
• QA has been looking over the feature and the old print UI on beta and haven’t found any blockers for backing out our latest uplifts
• Go/no-go decision to be made on Friday, Sept 11

Performance

• dthayer is working on a patch to show a “skeleton” of the browser early during startup on Windows

  • 

    Early skeleton UI displaying before the real UI shows up.

• bigiri has the about:newtab DevTools working with his ASRouter refactor, and is fixing the remaining broken tests
• emalysz has a patch up to lazify the Page Action menu
• Gijs has been eliminating main thread IO when saving files, and is looking to eliminate more when saving pages, and when downloading background updates
• mconley has a series of patches up to make it easier for front-end code to add BHR annotations for important user interactions

Picture-in-Picture

• The toggle variation experiment is now live! We should hopefully have some data to help us make a selection on which toggle to proceed with soon.
  • 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+
• MSU students are working on improving Picture-in-Picture! Here’s the metabug.

Search and Navigation

Search

• Cleanup the search service after modern configuration shipped – Bug 1619922
  • Legacy search configuration code has been removed – Bug 1619926, Bug 1642990
  • Work is ongoing to improve some of the architecture of the search service and should be complete in the 82 cycle.
• Consolidation of search aliases and bookmark keywords – Bug 1650874
  • Internal search keywords are now shown in about:preferences#search – Bug 1658713
  • WIP – Initial implementation of user defined search engines – Bug 1106626

Address Bar

• Urlbar Design Update 2
  • Behavior change: Left/Right keys on one-off buttons move the caret rather than trapping the user in one-off buttons – Bug 1632318
  • Improvement: Some restriction characters (*, %, ^) are converted to search mode when a space is typed after them to restrict results – Bug 1658964

User Journey

• Added Homepage targeting for Homepage Remediation CFR
• Various about:welcome updates with 80 release and v3 experiment launch
  • Removing trailhead experience now that multistage is the default
  • Keeping a no-onboarding experience for experiment baseline

WebRTC UI

• mconley is working on adding Task Tray icons on Windows to indicate that devices are being shared
  • We have something similar on macOS already