These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 87

Highlights

• Starting from Firefox 86, WebExtensions will not need to request the broader “tabs” permission to have access to some of the more privileged part of the tabs API (in particular access to tab url, title and favicon url) on tabs they have host permissions for – Bug 1679688. Thanks to robbendebiene for contributing this enhancement!
• Over ¼ of our Nightly population has Fission enabled, either by opting in, or via Normandy!
  • You can go to about:support to see if Fission is enabled. You can opt in to using it on Nightly by visiting about:preferences#experimental
  • Think you’ve found a Fission bug? Please file it here!
• With the export and now import of logins landed and looking likely to ship soon, we are starting to have a much better story for migrating from other browsers, password managers, other Firefox profiles, etc. We ingest a common subset of the many fields these kinds of software export. Please try it out and file bugs!
• Multiple Picture-in-Picture player support has been enabled to ride the trains in Firefox 86!

Friends of the Firefox team

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

Fixed more than one bug (between Jan. 12th and Jan 26th)

• Hunter Jones
• Swapnik Katkoori
• Tim Nguyen :ntim

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

Addon Manager & about:addons

• Starting from Firefox 86 about:addons will not (wrongly) show a pending update badge on all addons cards when a new extension is installed – Bug 1659283
  • Thanks to Tilden Windsor for contributing this fix!
• In preparation for “addons.mozilla.org API v3 deprecation”, usage of the addons.mozilla.org (AMO) API in Firefox has been updated to point to the AMO API v4 – Bug 1686187 (riding Firefox 86 train, will be also uplifted to ESR 78.8)
• “Line Extension” badge description in about:addons updated to make it clear that the extensions built by Mozilla are reviewed for security and performance (similarly to the description we already have on the “Recommended Extensions” badges) and to match the wording for the similar badge shown on the AMO listing pages – Bug 1687375

WebExtensions Framework

• Manifest V3 content security policy (CSP) updated in Nightly Fx86, the new base CSP will disallow remotely hosted code in extensions with manifest_version 3 (this is an ongoing work part of the changes needed to support manifest v3 extensions in Firefox, and so this restrictions does not affect manifest v2 extensions) – Bug 1594234

WebExtension APIs

• WebRequest internals do not await on “webRequest.onSendHeaders” listeners anymore (because they are not blocking listeners). Thanks to Brenda M Lima for contributing this fix!

Developer Tools

• Removed cd() command (was available on the Command line in the Console panel), bug 
  • The alternative will be JS Context Selector / IFrame picker
• Fixed support for debugging mochitests (bug)
  • mach test devtools/client/netmonitor/test/browser_net_api-calls.js –jsdebugger
  • Also works for xpcshell tests
• DevTools Fission M3 planning and analysis
  • Backlog almost ready
  • Implementation starts next week

Fission

• Over ¼ of our Nightly population has Fission enabled, either by opting in, or via Normandy!

Lint

• ESLint rule no-setter-return has now been enabled over the whole tree.

Password Manager

• Some contributors to thank:
  • Simon Wreckler for landing Bug 1577774 – “A hint message should be displayed when the “Website address” field is focused”
  • Harsh Gupta landed Bug 1680534 – “Re-mask passwords in about:logins after primary password timeout”
  • Petcuandrei for his on-going work on the much requested feature to import logins from a CSV file (Bug 1650675). This is being held to Nightly until we land some of its follow-up bugs.
    • Login CSV Import menu screenshot
    • Login CSV Import dialog screenshot

PDFs & Printing

• Rolling out on release. Currently at 25% enabled, plan to monitor errors and increase to 100% in late February
• Simplify page feature is a work-in-progress, but close to being finished.
• Duplex printing orientation is the last remaining feature to add. We’re waiting on icons from UX.

Performance

• bigiri landed a patch to migrate us from OSFile to IOUtils – fixed SharedDataMap.jsm this time.
• dthayer landed a patch to ensure NS_NewNamedThread no longer blocks the main thread, and has a patch up to gather failure Telemetry for the Pre-XUL skeleton UI
• emalysz fixed some minor Pre-XUL skeleton UI inconsistencies, and also landed a patch to make it account for the bookmarks toolbar
• emalysz also landed a patch to get rid of some OSFile usage in DownloadIntegration.jsm
• Gijs fixed some wonky Telemetry-gathering for slow scripts caused by how floats were being stored
• Gijs also made it so that the bookmarks toolbar doesn’t delay its appearance if it has already initialized that session, and also added some paint telemetry for it
• mconley is prepping an experiment to see how the Pre-XUL Skeleton UI and about:home startup cache impact user behaviour on the release channel
• Bas landed a patch to avoid instantiating our accessibility code (which comes with a significant performance cost) for cases where the user would not benefit (eg. Windows machines with a touch screen). Telemetry data shows accessibility instantiations have been cut about in half since the patch landed.

Picture-in-Picture

• New group of MSU students just started! This semester we’ll be working with:
  • Tony (frostwyrm98)
  • David (heftydav)
  • Swapnik (katkoor2)
  • Oliver (popeoliv)
  • Guanlin (chenggu3)
• This past weekend was our intro hackathon:
  • Over the weekend, they already landed:
    • Bug 1670094 – Fixed Picture-in-Picture (PIP) explainer text never getting RTL aligned
    • Bug 1678351 – Removed some dead CSS
    • Bug 1626600 – Leave out the PIP context menu item for empty <video>’s
  • Not yet landed but made progress:
    • Bug 1654054 – Port video controls strings to Fluent
    • Bug 1674152 – Make PIP code generate Sphinx docs
    • Bug 1669205 – PIP icon will disappear when dragging the tab to create a new window
• Here’s the metabug for all their work.

Search and Navigation

• Added a new Nightly Experiments option for Address Bar IME (Input Method Editor) users – Bug 1685991
• A non-working Switch to Tab result could be offered for Top Sites in Private Browsing windows – Bug 1681697
• History results were not shown in Search Mode when the “Show history before search suggestions” option was enabled – Bug 1672507
• Address Bar performance improvements when highlighting search strings – Bug 1687767
• Fixed built-in Ebay search engine with multi word search strings – Bug 1683991

Screenshots

• Screenshots has new module owners. It was recently updated to use `browser.tabs.captureTab`. We hope to clean up the module a bit and start opening up mentored bugs.