Categories: News

These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 90

Highlights

  • The password manager now supports importing logins in CSV format. Import logins from CSV is in beta! Thank you to Andrei Petcu for contributing this great new feature. We now import and export logins, allowing you to round-trip from other browsers, other password managers, backed-up profiles or any other exotic scenario for which you can prepare a comma-separated values sheet, with at least password and URL columns for successful import into Firefox.
Screenshot of the Import Complete dialog on about:logins: showing 3 logins added, 0 updated, 1 duplicate and 1 error

Import logins from CSV now in beta

Screenshot of the Import Summary page: showing a count of logins added, updated, duplicated and errors, and a details row by row import result listing

View your logins and passwords imported to Nightly on the Import Summary page

  • Slow script notifications will now only show when the user is trying to interact with hanging content, and will show the title of the hanging tab, to simplify troubleshooting.
  • Want to learn more about Firefox DevTools? Check out the new site at firefox-dev.tools. Interested in contributing to the tools? Developer docs are here!
  • Fission Beta experiments will start this week, targeting Firefox 88
  • DevTools now supports showing raw JSON. Use the new toggle button for switching between raw and formatted request views. Thank you :sebo for this contribution! (Bug 1693147)
Screenshot of the Developer Tools network panel: showing side-by-side views of raw and formatted request views under the

Firefox Developer Tools has a toggle button for switching between raw and formatted request views

Friends of the Firefox team

For contributions made from March 10, 2021 to March 23, 2021, inclusive.

Introductions/Shout-Outs

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

Fixed more than one bug

  • Andrei Petcu [:petcuandrei]
  • Erica Wright [:ewright]
  • Sebastian Zartner [:sebo]
  • Tim Nguyen :ntim
  • Tom Schuster [:evilpie]

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

  • 🌟 Karthik Sundar [karthiksundar30092002] fixed a UI issue where expanding objects in the DevTools console made them jump around (Bug 1608571)
  • 🌟 Henry Vincent [henryvincent33] fixed a typo in an error message created by DevTools’ Front class (Bug 1699146)
  • 🌟 Renuka Bhure [bhurerenuka14] replaced BrowserTestUtils.waitForCondition with TestUtils.waitForCondition in browser_deleteLogin.js (Bug 1698812)
  • Sneha sai KNVS [snehaa2296] replaced BrowserTestUtils.waitForCondition with TestUtils.waitForCondition in browser_protectionsUI_report_breakage.js (Bug 1698076)
  • David [heftydav] fixed an issue where the Picture-in-Picture icon will disappear when dragging the tab to a new window (Bug 1669205)

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

Addon Manager & about:addons
  • Mark adjusted addon signature warning messagebar to make it easier to read on hover (Bug 1694428)
WebExtensions Framework
  • Fission-related fixes:
    • Fix DocumentChannel process switching on sidebar and popup extension pages (Bug 1646817)
    • Logging a deprecation warning on extensions using fission-incompatible canvas drawWindow (Bug 1696976)
      • As also described in the warning, extensions should use Use tabs.captureTab extensions API instead (which is fission compatible)
    • Support for out-of-process iframes in webNavigation.getAllFrames (Bug 1698398)
  • Starting from Firefox 88 Services is exposed by default in all WebExtensions API scripts (included the experimental APIs embedded in privileged and builtin addons) – Bug 1698158:
WebExtension APIs
  • As part of the FTP removal in Firefox 88 (Bug 1626365):
    • browserSettings.ftpProtocolEnable becomes read only
    • “ftp” has been added to the list of allowed protocols that extension can register as a protocol handler
    • in the proxy WebExtensions API, proxying ftp is deprecated

Developer Tools

Fission

  • Decided not to fix the disabled WebPayments UI for Fission.
  • Closed the frontend fission metabug!

Installer & Updater

Lint

  • If you run ./mach lint in the top-level directory of a repository, with no paths specified, it will now default to –outgoing –workdir, rather than doing a full lint.

Messaging System

Password Manager

  • Bug 1688213 Enable “signon.management.page.fileImport.enabled” for all channels fixed and in 88.
    • Import logins from CSV is in beta! Congrats to :petcuandrei for taking this feature from a UX spec and aspirational bugs to implementing and now shipping a feature that rounds out our whole story around login management.
    • We now import and export logins, allowing you to round-trip from other browsers, other password managers, backed-up profiles or any other exotic scenario for which you can prepare a comma-separated values sheet, with at least password and URL columns for successful import into Firefox.
    • We also have the ability to delete all, so the cost is low to play around with it and file bugs.
  • :dimi landed Bug 1166995 – Run login capture code when a form or a formless password field is removed from the document tree. This fixed some long standing issues with prompting to save passwords on sites e.g bigcommerce.com, and no doubt many many others we were never notified about

PDFs & Printing

  • Bug 1682162 – Print margin unit should be localized. This landed in 88, so now margin units are displayed according to the unit indicated by your printer.

Print settings screenshot showing margin picker with the label “Custom (mm)

Performance

  • dthayer is also working on various improvements and bug-fixes for the Pre-XUL Skeleton UI
  • florian added some very handy profiler markers for CSS animations and transitions
  • The Pre-XUL Skeleton UI experiment will be wrapping up next week, and we hope to have some data on how it impacts new and existing user behaviour
  • The Process Priority Manager was originally going to be disabled for Fission, however we’ve found it’s still useful on low end hardware. Now we are working on adapting it to work on subframes.
  • mconley spoke with k88hudson about using Nimbus / ExperimentsAPI to run an about:home startup cache experiment
    • Originally, we had a Normandy experiment set up for about:home startup cache, but it turns out Normandy sets its prefs too late. Nimbus seems to do it earlier, which is good for us.
  • barret fixed an AsyncShutdown bug for IOUtils, which should be the final blocker to remove the remainder of the OSFile uses in the tree! \o/

Performance Tools

Screenshot of CPU Utilization graph in the Firefox Profiler: shows a

Before and after the CPU utilization changes in the graph. You can notice that there are no activities in some areas in the new graph.

Picture-in-Picture

  • Molly [mhowell] and Micah [mtigley] are working on setting up a foundation for site-specific video wrappers (Bug 1670108)
  • Oliver [popeoliv]
    • Landed some documentation for the Picture-in-Picture addon (Bug 1695266)
    • Started investigating how we can allow the Picture-in-Picture player window to continue playing even after the parent tab closes (Bug 1561301)
  • Swapnik [katkoor2] submitted a patch where we prevent showing the Picture-in-Picture toggle button for videos with an invalid duration (Bug 1697616)

Search and Navigation

  • If a search engine that is set as default is removed, we will now revert to the region/locale default if it is not hidden, or we will try revert to a general search engine.
  • Fixed an issue where updating an add-on which defined a search engine, and changing the search engine name could cause issues.
  • nsISearchService.addEngineWithDetails has now been removed. This had become a test-only function, but conflicted with future work. Please prefer SearchTestUtils.installSearchExtension instead.
  • Cleaned up the Search Telemetry in tree documentation – Bug 1698847
  • Improved Address Bar handling of pasted strings containing white spaces – Bug 1327589
  • Fixed a problem with editing the case of the url ref fragment – Bug 1693320
  • Fixed a problem causing Tab to Search results to appear at the wrong index – Bug 1697517

Screenshots

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