These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 84

Highlights

• Nightly users can now manage their homepage and newtab page from about:preferences. This allows them to use the default homepage even if an extension has provided one of its own. (Bug 1595858)
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• An option to hide the “Other Bookmarks” folder has been made available through the bookmarks toolbar context menu. We have a follow-up to remove the menu item from the main toolbar (View → Toolbars → Bookmarks Toolbar) and only show it for the bookmarks toolbar.
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• A new pretty-print button has been introduced for the multiline editor in the Console panel
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• In the AwesomeBar, it’s now possible to hide or unhide local shortcut buttons (bookmarks, history, tabs) in the results panel, using Search Preferences – and now they show their restriction character as a keyword
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• Did you know that you can enable multiple Picture-in-Picture player windows in Firefox Nightly by going to about:preferences#experimental ? Give it a shot, and then let us know if it’s useful for you.
• Flash EOL has landed in Firefox Nightly! Blog post.
  • The Internet Archive has started to host Flash content that can be played with the ruffle.rs runtime

Friends of the Firefox team

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

Fixed more than one bug

• Michael Goossens
• Oriol Brufau [:Oriol]
• Tim Nguyen :ntim
  • Special thanks for leading the charge on removing xul:grid!

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

• 🌟 Liz Krane fixed “Undo Close Tabs” to be more reliable when an extension closes multiple tabs.
• Niklas Baumgardner fixed an issue where the wrong Picture-in-Picture telemetry was being recorded.
• Reid Shinabarker made sure the PiP toggle points in the correct direction, including in RTL locales.
• Chris Jackson fixed an issue where closing a PiP windowing containing a video conference cut off the mic and camera.
• 🌟 Ankush Singhal fixed a formatting issue in nsNavHistoryResult.cpp.
• 🌟 Florent Viard fixed har export from DevTools Netmonitor.
• 🌟 Kartik Gautam replaced :not(:is(X)) with :not(X) throughout the entire Firefox codebase.

Project Updates

Addon Manager & about:addons

• Mark Striemer did land the remaining small changes needed to remove XUL deck usage from about:addons (Bug 1674890) and ntim did some more cleanups on the about:addons (Bug 1677582, Bug 1677571, Bug 1677526), in preparation to move the HTML views to the top level document (Bug 1525179).

WebExtension APIs

• Liz Krane contributed changes to browser.tabs.remove to make sure that (after an extension did call it to remove multiple tabs at once) “Undo Close Tabs” will be able to reopen all of them at once (Bug 1650956). Thanks Liz for contributing this small enhancement!!!
• browser.browsingData.removePluginData API method is a no-op starting from Firefox 85 (Bug 1675106), part of the cleanup related to removing all flash plugin support in mozilla-central (tracked by Bug 1677160).
• Christoph Kerschbaumer added a new browser.privacy.network.httpsOnlyMode read-only privacy browser setting, which will allow an extension to be aware if the https only mode is currently enabled (Bug 1678306).

Developer Tools

• DevTools Fission – Making DevTools Fission compatible

• Significant simplification of the Network panel logic used to send collected data from the backend (DevTools Server) to the front-end (DevTools Toolbox). Data is now sent as-is with no transformation in the middle and the UI (React components) are consuming exactly the same structure as generated on the server side. Modification has positively impacted RDP traffic and protocol performance.

Fission

•  Neil is working on:
  • Smarter tab unloading
  • UI to make it easier to submit crash reports for crashed subframes

Password Manager

• tgiles has landed a patch that allows a user to remove all of their logins at once

PDFs & Printing

• emalysz updated the system dialog link to not need to wait for the initial preview to finish, which could take a while on large pages
• sfoster updated the Cancel button to say Close once a print starts, since clicking it won’t cancel the print
• mstriemer added frontend support for pages-per-sheet (thanks dholbert for the platform support)
  • This is behind the print.pages_per_sheet.enabled pref while more options are added

Performance

• bigiri is working on a patch to stop loading OSFile.jsm in the SharedDataMap module
• emalysz made it possible to stash and restore the built-in theme colours in the Windows registry for the pre-XUL skeleton UI
• florian has made it much easier to associate BHR hang reports on his dashboard with existing bugs
  • This is done by setting a whiteboard flag with [bhr:<frame name>] in the associated bug
  • Go check out the dashboard! Is there a hang in this list for one of your components? File a bug if there isn’t one already, and please prioritize. Reach out to the performance team if you want ideas on how to relieve the hang.
• mconley has landed multiple patches in an attempt to solve an AsyncShutdown hang caused by the about:home startup cache. The latest patch will hopefully take care of it.
• mconley is working on updating the BHR schema definition so that it can be stored in an easier-to-use format in our databases
• Reminder: emalysz is mentoring people on an effort to move us off of OSFile.jsm, and onto IOUtils. Know someone who might be interested? Here’s the metabug!

Picture-in-Picture

• Our MSU Capstone students are going to be wrapping up in a few weeks. A big thank you to them for all of their great work this semester! They are:
  • Niklas Baumgardner (:baumga91)
  • Chris Jackson (:jack1391)
  • Hunter Jones (:whjones526)
  • Manish Rajendran (:rajendran.manish)
  • Reid Shinabarker (:reidshina6)
• Recently fixed bugs:
  • Bug 1661225 – [PI-713] The “move” PiP telemetry event is registered when the PiP window is opened or closed
  • Bug 1666637 – [RTL] The new PIP toggle points in the wrong direction, even for RTL documents
  • Bug 1672623 – Closing the picture-in-picture window pauses the cloned video element which is questionable for video conferences
• 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 1604247 – Provide an easy way to snap a PiP window back to a corner after moving it elsewhere
  • Bug 1670108 – Create infrastructure for site-specific video player adapters
  • Bug 1677107 – Add Telemetry for tracking multiple PiP support usage

Search and Navigation

• Fixed a race condition leaving the address bar in Search Mode when switching tabs – Bug 1675926
• The address bar doesn’t default to search anymore for strings like www.something – Bug 1643850
• URL autofill is now properly case-insensitive – Bug 1606231
• QuickSuggest is the project name for contextual suggestions in the urlbar, things like weather, unit conversion, or shopping helpers fall into this project. The team is working on experiments that will run in the next few weeks, and various partners are involved.
• Some regressions related to Korean IME have been reported, we’re looking into them. – Bug 1673669, Bug 1679697