These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 80

Highlights

• We now show three recommended articles when saving a webpage to Pocket.

The “Saved to Pocket” doorhanger is open. A “similar stories” section is open at the bottom with articles about cooking.

• • To enable this, set extensions.pocket.onSaveRecs to true, and restart.
  • This is an enhancement and thus will be turned on by default without an experiment.
• We implemented a minimal skeleton UI which will display immediately when starting Firefox, intended to give early visual feedback to users on slow systems. Windows users can turn this on by setting the pref “browser.startup.preXulSkeletonUI” to true (currently only works for the default Firefox theme.)
• We’re mentoring a set of students from MSU on various Picture-in-Picture improvements. Recent fixes include:
  • We now close the player window if the site hosting the originating video requests DOM fullscreen
  • We’ve implemented the keyboard shortcut for opening a video in Picture-in-Picture on macOS (Cmd-Opt-Shift-]). We’ve also put the close button on the left side on macOS, which is more native to the platform.
• Changes to the Add-on Manager to support the Promoted Add-ons pilot program have been landed in Firefox 82, in particular to:
  • show in about:addons the new “Verified” and “Line extension” badges (Bug 1657476)
  • allow “Verified”, “Recommended” and “Line” extensions to be hosted on third party websites (Bug 1659530)
• Reminder: You can help us test Fission (out-of-process iframes) in Nightly by setting fission.autostart to true in about:config, and restarting the browser
  • If you find any Fission bugs, please report them under the meta fission-dogfooding. The Fission team appreciates your help. 🙂

Friends of the Firefox team

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

Fixed more than one bug

• Chris Jackson
• Kriyszig
• Michael Goossens
• Reid Shinabarker

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

• 🌟 Tanner Drake made sure that we always respect the browser.search.openintab pref.
• 🌟 Ben D (:rockingskier) implemented STOMP WebSocket message parsing.
• 🌟 Chris Jackson, 🌟 Hunter Jones, 🌟 Reid Shinabarker, and 🌟 Manish Rajendran fixed many Picture-in-Picture bugs! See this issue’s PiP section for details.

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

WebExtension APIs

• Agi fixed a regression on tabs.capureVisibleTab when used on GeckoView (Bug 1664522, originally regressed by Bug 1636508)
• The topSites API will now provide the ActivityStream top sites icons as data URIs (Bug 1662654, changes needed to unblock Bug 1654258)
• Michael Goossens contributed a couple of nice enhancements to the browse.tabs and browser.webRequest WebExtensions APIs and fixed a small bug in the browser.test WebExtensions API, thanks Michael!
  • Bug 1662329 – Drop cookie permission requirement for receiving the cookieStoreId property as part of the tab details, cookieStoreId is the tab property that allow an extension to know if a tab is a container tab
  • Bug 1654833 – Improve error message when webRequest event listener is passed an invalid `urls` value
  • Bug 1664725 – Getting expecting rejection to match gets <unknown> instead of actual expectation, this fixes a small old regression in the browser.test WebExtensions API, the API is not available outside of the testing environment but this is still a nice fix because it make sure that those test failure are going to contain more useful details about the assertion that did fail.

Developer Tools

• Shipping Server Sent Events (SSE) Inspector – Server-Sent Events (SSE) is a server push technology enabling a client to receive automatic updates from a server via HTTP connection (mdn). The SSE Inspector is part of the existing Network Panel in DevTools reusing the user interface for inspecting WebSockets.
  • Contributed by a student (former GSoC candidate)
• DevTools Fission M2
  • Working on main architecture changes and adopting panel by panel.
  • Focusing on testing (preparation for the Fission Nightly experiment, Oct 9)
• Marionette Fission
  • Main infrastructure changes landed, focusing on individual commands now.

Fission

• The next milestone M6b has 29 remaining bugs. The most significant remaining change remaining is moving most of the session history to the parent process rather than each child. The current plan is to enable this for M6b. You can try it out by enabling the ‘fission.sessionHistoryInParent’ preference along with ‘fission.autostart’ preference and report any bugs related to bug 1656208.
• A fission nightly experiment will be launched soon in early October.
• In early October, Fission will also be available as an opt-in feature in about:preferences for Nightly only.

Installer & Updater

• bytesized is taking on the long-standing update related papercut known as the staged updates bug (353804). When this happens, you may see Firefox update…only to be prompted to update immediately again afterwards. The work is still in planning stages (see details here) and will apply to partial updates only. Currently targeting Firefox 84.
• nalexander is adding attribution support for macOS (1619353) which is targeting Firefox 83.

Password Manager

• Change password manager tests to not use a fixed hostname
• Some password manager tests fail intermittently because the ‘passwordmgr-processed-form’ notification is delayed.
• The Ellipsis menu is wrongly dismissed when clicking inside it
• In progress: Update password manager recipes from a server/kinto/Remote Settings

PDFs & Printing

• Looking at potential blockers for 82
  • Some users are seeing long dialog loading times
  • Some users are seeing incorrect page sizes where the page is very small
  • Custom margins can no longer be set, adding support for them
  • Occasional preview errors when opening the dialog as the page is loading

Performance

• bigiri has continued working on the ASRouter refactor and is down to just a few remaining broken tests
• emalysz has been working on migrating the page action strings to fluent and lazifying the page action menu
• gijs fixed pgo file writing to ensure we collect profiling data from non-webcontent child processes
• gijs has been investigating different ways we can reduce the DOM size
• mconley, gijs, florian, dthayer, and esmyth met to discuss the future of BHR, which the team will be working on next month

Picture-in-Picture

• MSU students this semester are:
  • Hunter (:whjones)
  • Niklas (:nikbaumgardner)
  • Chris (:chrisj)
  • Reid (:rshinabarker)
  • Manish (:manishr)
• Hack weekend was a success! Much was learned, things were fixed.
• Fixed
  • Bug 1534986 – If a Picture-in-Picture’d video requests fullscreen, Picture-in-Picture should exit first
  • Bug 1596116 – Picture in Picture not correctly displayed or not displayed all when clicking the PiP button before the video starts
  • Bug 1599376 – Picture-in-Picture window can not be opened using the keyboard shortcut on macOS
  • Bug 1599803 – Factor out repeated logic in Picture-in-Picture tests
  • Bug 1603234 – Picture-in-Picture close button is on the wrong side on macOS
  • Bug 1620899 – Arrow keys don’t work in picture-in-picture window after tabbing unless play/pause is pressed
  • Bug 1617135 – If PiP is in focus the keyboard combination CTRL+SHIFT+] doesn’t work for closing the frame.
• Underway
  • Bug 1589680 – Make it possible to have more than one Picture-in-Picture window
    • This is just going to be experimental to start. We’re not yet sure if there’s a real use case here to support, but we want to prototype it.
  • Bug 1604247 – Provide an easy way to snap a PiP window back to a corner after moving it elsewhere
  • Bug 1612648 – Picture in picture icon overlay overlaps mute tab
  • Bug 1578985 – Picture-in-Picture does not remember location and size of the popout windows
  • Bug 1653496 – Picture-in-Picture option not shown for VideoHTMLElement with VideoTrack from Twilio
    • Fixing this should re-enable PiP capabilities on MediaStream videos
  • Bug 1664867 – Add tests to confirm that we select the right video when using the keyboard shortcut for PiP
• In-tree documentation was added
• Keyboard shortcuts in the player for seeking and controlling audio are set to ride out in Firefox 83

Search and Navigation

Search

• Separate private browsing engine feature (Nightly-only) has been disabled, while we figure out its destiny – Bug 1665301
• Cleanup the search service after config modernization – Bug 1619922
  • The work completed, any remaining changes will be handled as usual bug fixes.
• Consolidation of aliases and search keywords – Bug 1650874
  • UX working on a restyle of search preferences

Address Bar

• Urlbar Update 2
  • Release moved to Firefox 83, including both search shortcuts and tab to search.
  • Lots of fixes and polish for the search shortcuts functionality (Bug 1659204, Bug 1662477, Bug 1657801, Bug 1658624, Bug1660778, …)
  • One-off buttons support key modifiers – CTRL/CMD to immediately search in new tab, SHIFT for the current tab (override search mode) – Bug 1657212

User Journey

• Homepage remediation CFR now visually redirects to the restored home page
• Adjust Alpenglow theme background for borders and button placement
• Configuration option to show importable site names on about:welcome
• Directly migrate passwords without wizard UI for single profile browsers

WebRTC UI

• New indicator has slipped again. Thankfully, we seem to have converged on a design that we think we can ship by default, so hopefully that will ride out in 83!
• mconley is adding Notification Area icons to show device sharing state on Windows
  • This nearly made it in before the soft freeze, but got stymied by an unexpected shutdown leak, which mconley is now investigating.