These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 82

Highlights

• Urlbar Update 2 enabled on Firefox Beta. This work includes Search Mode, refreshed one-offs, and tab-to-search results.
• We recently introduced tab-to-search results that are shown when a search engine’s domain is autofilled (e.g. google.com). The first few times we show tab-to-search results, we now show a larger onboarding result.
• Overflow debugging has been enabled in Nightly (call for feedback and comments)
  • Done as part of GSoC and a larger team collaboration between DevTools and Platform. Thank you to everyone who has been part of the meta!
  • New Scroll badge next to elements that do have a scrollable overflow area.
    • You can also click on the “scroll” badge for scrollable elements to toggle highlighting of the overflow causing elements, which also have a new “overflow” badge next to them.
      

• In Firefox 84, the Add-ons Manager now shows optional permissions which the user can directly manage (until now only the extension could initiate the grant and revoke of the optional permissions) – Bug 1624513
  • Limitations: at the moment only the <all_urls> and “all urls”-like (e.g. https://*/*) host optional permissions are being listed and can be managed in about:addons, Bug 1497075 is the follow up that is tracking further improvement in this area (“giving the user more control on the host permissions”)

Friends of the Firefox team

Introductions/Shout-Outs

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

Fixed more than one bug

• Ben D (:rockingskier)
• Hunter Jones
• Itiel
• Miguel Roncancio

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

• Miguel Roncancio added support for filtering group messages in the console and closed groups on navigation.
• Tanner Drake fixed the context menu when right clicking the search bar.
• Reid Shinabarker fixed Picture-in-Picture on VideoTrack from Twilio.
• 🌟 Richa Sharma fixed the error message shown when the browser.tabs WebExtension API can’t access a tab.
• Hunter Jones created a separate actor for launching Picture-in-Picture windows and fixed the PiP context menu.
• Chris Jackson fixed a Picture-in-Picture test.
• 🌟 Jasleen Kaur fixed a typo in the DevTools docs.

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

WebExtension APIs

• Richa Sharma contributed a fix that makes sure that when browser.tabs.sendMessage is called on an invalid tab id (e.g. related to a non existing or a pending tab) the API call rejects with a more clear “Could not establish connection. Receiving end does not exist” error (instead of the generic “An unexpected error occurred”) – Bug 1665568 (previously regressed in Firefox 79 by Bug 1583484)

Bookmarks

• Jared fixed an issue where favicons in the bookmarks toolbar flicker when starting Firefox or opening a new window (see 1597084)

Developer Tools

• Continue making DevTools Fission compatible (wiki with known issues)

Fission

• Nightly experiment is underway! This turns on Fission for a subset of the Nightly population to gauge stability, performance and usability. Users can also opt-in to Fission on Nightly in about:preferences#experimental.

Installer & Updater

• nalexander landed working macOS attribution!
• bytesized landed tracking progress for multiple updates, laying the groundwork for downloading a new update while one is already staged (in progress)
• mhowell is wrapping up work on the semaphore, to prevent multiple instances from updating each other, and to let the user know when Firefox can’t update as a result
• nalexander continues work on the framework for the Background Update Agent (WIP for experimentation)
• agashlin is finishing up testing of an uninstall ping

Pocket

• The feature that shows additional recommendations in the panel when saving a page to Pocket just went out to release!

PDFs & Printing

• Emilio added support for “Print Selection Only” from the context menu when you have text selected Bug 140718 (19 year old bug!)
• Emma fixed a bug where printing immediately after changing some settings could lose your change Bug 1668476
• Sam has a patch (pending test failures) to handle more cases where users might have invalid paper size prefs saved Bug 1666523
• Emma added some more telemetry to record any unexpected errors Bug 1668242
• Neil has a patch in review to move PrintingChild to a JSWindowActor (it’s the last legacy actor :o) Bug 1669369

Performance

• Doug has been working on the new skeleton UI and adding support for maximized windows to it
• Doug is also advancing late write checks (which allow for very very fast shutdown/restart) on beta now
• Bernard’s patch to use JSWindowActor for about:newtab internals is almost ready
• Emma is mentoring and preparing the ground to move consumers from OS.File to IOUtils to improve startup times
• Emma is also fixing the URL bar dimensions in the skeleton UI
• Emma landed lazification of the page action menu!
• Florian has added markers for thread creation
• Gijs diagnosed an issue with our threadpool implementation based on the information from these markers.
• Gijs also landed some telemetry for hangs in the parent process (where we would previously have shown the modal dialog which is now disabled everywhere)
• Mike will soon be landing UserInteraction markers for BHR – this will help with diagnosing what causes (or at least is correlated with) hangs that affect users.

Performance Tools

• Lots of improvements, bug fixes and code maintenance during the Outreachy contribution period! Complete list can be found here. Thank you all!
• Flame graph tooltips now show the add-on name as resource (NisaSource).
• If a marker has stack information, tooltip also shows when that stack information is captured (km-js).
• Better timestamps for the Styles and Reflow markers. It was always showing the invalidation time as milliseconds, now it finds the most suitable unit (Cheederah).
• Made the text of stack information more accessible by selecting a color with better contrast ratio (hetpatel33).
• Made the origin texts of markers more accessible by selecting a color with better contrast ratio (hetpatel33).
• Add-on icons now contain add-on names as alternative texts in the call-tree (Cheederah).
• Made the screenshots bigger in the timeline (CipherGirl).

Picture-in-Picture

• Fixed
  • Bug 1653496 – Picture-in-Picture option not shown for VideoHTMLElement with VideoTrack from Twilio
  • Bug 1667409 – Implement Picture-in-Picture Launcher for spawning new Picture-in-Picture windows
    • Fixed regression: Bug 1671341 – PiP will not turn off from context menu when “Enable picture-in-picture video controls” is unchecked in Preferences
• In Review
  • Bug 1670254 – Remove toggle experimentation code now that we’ve settled on Mode 2.
• In Progress
  • Bug 1666739 – PiP player is enabled when clicking Skip Ads button while PiP description is shown and the firefox window is smaller
  • Bug 1666637 – [RTL] The new PIP toggle points in the wrong direction, even for RTL documents
  • Bug 1667840 – Refactor PictureInPictureChild actor to not use global state
  • Bug 1578985 – Picture-in-Picture does not remember location and size of the popout windows
    • Just dealing with Linux test failures now
  • Bug 1604247 – Provide an easy way to snap a PiP window back to a corner after moving it elsewhere
    • This works on macOS, but we’re running into issues on Windows and Linux. We’ve opened this bug to deal with the Windows issue.

Search and Navigation

• Fixed a bug where the urlbar couldn’t search for single words with a default POST search engine – Bug 1667931
• Urlbar Update 2
  • Various polish fixes for both tab to search and search shortcuts
  • Search mode is now supported by Session Restore – Bug 1655486

User Journey

• Restored Return to AMO functionality on about:welcome based on installer attribution
• Launching a few experiments in 82 release:
  • Wizard-less password import to skip full import flow in certain cases
  • Zero-stage welcome to study minimal onboarding experience
  • Home page remediation to offer resetting homepage to Firefox Home

WebRTC UI

• Fixed:
  • Bug 1669649 – The context menu of the “mic”/”camera”/”share screen” icons from the tray is not properly diplayed
  • Bug 1669801 – The screen share counter from the tray is not working when sharing windows
• QA is testing the implementation on Beta now.
• Reminder: In about:preferences#experimental on Nightly (and soon in Beta for Windows and macOS), you can opt-in to enabling the global microphone and camera mute toggles.