These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 86

Highlights

• Some new printing enhancements have recently landed:
  • emalysz added a checkbox to only print the selection if there is one
  • dholbert added support for printing 2 and 6 pages-per-sheet
• dthayer has enabled the skeleton UI on Nightly!
  • This is a Windows-only perceived performance startup optimization that paints the structure of the browser UI very early on during the process lifetime.
  • The dev-platform announcement goes into further detail on how this works, and where to file bugs if you see any
  • Here’s a video demonstration showing the skeleton UI when starting up Firefox on very slow hardware, to better see what’s happening (it usually flashes by quite quickly on fast hardware).
• Have you recently uploaded a performance profile, and accidentally shared data you didn’t want to? You can now completely delete your profile from the “Uploaded Profile” menu in the top right of the profile viewer
  

  Delete confirmation popup while deleting the profile.

Friends of the Firefox team

Introductions/Shout-Outs

• [mconley] Welcome mhowell to the front-end team! She’s reporting to bwinton, and will be working on Proton-y things to start

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

Fixed more than one bug

• Michelle Goossens
• Oriol Brufau [:Oriol]
• Tim Nguyen :ntim

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

• Akshat.dixit71 moved invalid-engine.xml to the OpenSearch test sub-directory.
• 🌟 Paul Dill allowed PDFs linked to from other PDFs to be opened in Firefox.
• 🌟 Rahul ensured that URLs in the DevTools Network panel are fully decoded.
• 🌟 Abhishek Sharma removed defer usage in devtools/client/shared/components/test/chrome/head.js.
• 🌟 Pedro Fonseca removed defer usage in devtools/server/tests/xpcshell/head_dbg.js.
• 🌟 Kaique da Silva removed defer usage in devtools/shared/webconsole/test/xpcshell/test_throttle.js.

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

Addon Manager & about:addons

• Thanks to emilio’s patch, starting from Firefox 86 the zoom levels for the extensions options pages embedded in the about:addons tabs should be set as expected – Bug 1398481.

WebExtensions Framework

• Sonia contributed a small but nice cleanup by removing the extensions.webextensions.tabhide.enabled preference. Thanks Sonia!
• A regression was fixed (introduced by Bug 1638422) related to making sure that webRequest StreamFilter is disconnected after a redirect – Bug 1683189
• A crash was fixed in webRequests StreamFilter on view-source requests (Bug 1678734)

WebExtension APIs

• A redirect URI is now allowed to be set to a loopback address in the identity.launchWebAuthFlow API. This was needed to allow extension to successfully integrate OAuth authentication for some common web services (e.g. google services) – Bug 1635344 (landed in Firefox 86, uplifted to 85, will also be uplifted to 78 ESR)

Developer Tools

• Added an error count button in the Toolbar, which shows the amount of errors on the current page.
  

  There’s a new error count badge in Developer Tools.

• Landed a performance fix for the Browser Console (bug)
• Planned a few upcoming projects:
  • DevTools Fission M3 (reaching feature parity with pre-Fission state)
  • WebDriver BiDi (a standardization project to specify a bidirectional, automation-focused protocol for the future)

Lint

• globalThis is now fully enabled for ESLint. Some support was previously enabled, but the definition for the global was missing.
• Whitespace linter now also fails for missing whitespace at the end of files.
• no-async-promise-executor is now enabled everywhere in the tree.
• Don’t forget: There’s a “Lint and Formatting” (#lint:mozilla.org) channel on Matrix for all your lint and formatting questions.

New Tab Page

• New personalization for sponsored content just landed in Nightly, and is having a rollout for Firefox 84/85.
  • This is still all client-side, but uses a topic based interest profile rather than matching on domains in browser history.

Password Manager

• Thanks to Kenrick85 for their continued contributions, recently landing bug 1579108 to fix alignment in the about:logins item/edit form layout.
• Dlee and tgiles have been cleaning up about:logins with a series of patches landed:
  • Bug 1678633 – “A blank page is wrongly displayed on the “about:logins” page after signing out from Firefox Sync and checking the option to delete all data”
  • Bug 1679131 – “Remove all confirmation modal – icon and close button icons can be dragged”
  • Bug 1683615 – “about:logins – in-page focus jumps on the meatball menu when navigating by keyboard”
• Thanks :dao for fixing Bug 1683678 – Mask password button is no longer visible if Light theme is used.

Performance

• bigiri, emalysz, and masterwayz are continuing to remove OS.File usage from the startup path and have collectively posted patches for ClientID.jsm, Sqlite.jsm, SharedDataMap.jsm, SessionWorker.jsm, PageThumbs.jsm, XPIProvider.jsm, and DownloadIntegration.jsm.
  • Thanks to gijs and barret for all the reviews!
• emalysz worked on RTL support for the skeleton UI.
• mconley completed an analysis on the performance impact of using built-in fonts for Proton.
• gijs fixed a toolbar flicker bug.
• gijs continues to investigate the DOM size for potential performance wins
• dthayer propagated annotations from the Background Hang Reporter (BHR) ping through the processing job and worked with florian to display annotation information in his BHR exploration tool.

Performance Tools

• Now you can see the proportion of nursery-allocated strings that were deduplicated on the GC Minor markers thanks to sfink.
  

  A new GCMinor marker tooltip includes the proportion of nursery-allocated strings that were deduplicated.

• We improved accessibility in the network chart.

Picture-in-Picture

• We have a new set of students from MSU starting soon! mhowell and mtigley will be mentoring them. This is the metabug for their work.

Proton

• Watch this space! Proton is a UI refresh effort that’s just starting to get off of the ground. Expect stylistic and content changes to the toolbars, menus, tabs, etc.
• Here’s the metabug. All work will fold under it. And here’s the wiki page.
• There’s a browser.proton.enabled pref, but it’s early days, so this doesn’t do anything right now. As Proton-associated changes land, they’ll be keyed off of this pref.
• Some things we think we can start working on and landing sooner, so we’re working on that as designs are solidified.

Search and Navigation

• Fixed a performance problem when a very long search history entry was suggested: Bug 1682434
• Fixed a race condition where pressing ESC may not always exit search mode: Bug 1677325
• Fixed a bug causing Bookmarks, Tabs, History buttons to disappear from Search Preferences when restoring defaults: Bug 1681818
• Removed most browser.urlbar.update2.* prefs in Firefox 86. A few were left for features that are still under consideration: Bug 1665049