These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 103

Highlights

• The current plan is to begin the slow rollout of Fission (Site Isolation in Firefox) next week for users on the release channel
• We enabled the new downloads experience on Nightly only! (not shipping or on beta with 95)
  • If you have questions, please see the public explainer doc first to see if it’s answered there
  • If you see issues, please use one of the links in that doc to file a bug.
• Some really great stuff for users on macOS have landed recently in Nightly:
  • Firefox now supports sending webpages via Handoff: when you have a page open in Firefox on your Mac, you will see a prompt to open that page on your other nearby Apple devices (bug 1525788).
  • Starting in Firefox 94, watching fullscreen video on Mac will consume significantly less battery power (meta 1653417).
  • Fonts are now rendered correctly on non-English systems running macOS 12 (bug 1732629).
  • Content process startup is 30-70% faster (bug 1467758).
• Thanks to :emilio for making the autofill background color configurable
  • This can be configured in Nightly by setting an rgba string value to `ui.-moz-autofill-background`. Inline source documentation is here.

Friends of the Firefox team

For contributions from October 19th to November 1st 2021, inclusive.

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

Fixed more than one bug

• Itiel
• jbarson
• Leslie
• Mathew Hodson
• onuohamiriam44
• onuohaoluebube05
• Oriol Brufau [:Oriol]

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

• Tanju Brunostar fixed an issue where “www.” was prepended to non-URLs like “.de”, leading the user to the wrong place.
• 🌟Simon Farre removed an unnecessary split() in UrlbarInput.search().

• 🌟secret.okra-0z (sadie) fixed a contrast issue on the new tab page.

• 🌟Rashelle added a context menu item for Picture-in-Picture windows to move them to the Left (Right) side of the screen.

• • 🌟Raquel Vargas fixed an inconsistently-sized border in the findbar box.
  • 🌟Piotr Henryk Dabrowsk added IDs to h2 tags in about:support for easy access with URL fragments.
  • 🌟Onuoha Oluebube fixed three bugs:
    • Bug 1733422 – SessionStore.getClosedWindowData should always return an object
    • Bug 1737301 – Remove osfile.jsm usage from browser/base/content/test/performance/ tests
    • Bug 1737304 – Remove osfile.jsm usage from browser/base/content/test/tabcrashed/browser_aboutRestartRequired_buildid.js test

• 🌟Miriam Onuoha fixed three bugs:

• • • Bug 1735163 – [Monochromatic Themes] The ‘Why’ button from the ETP panel does not have the theme hover color
    • Bug 1737306 – Remove osfile.jsm usage from browser/components/downloads/test/
    • Bug 1738232 – Stop using the second argument to ChromeUtils.import in password manager tests

• lesore0789 (Leslie) fixed four bugs:

• • • Bug 1737054 – HCM hover state on shield/lock does not match page actions
    • Bug 1736699 – Remove extraneous comment in FormAutofillHeuristics.jsm
    • Bug 1723679 – [de][Clear Recent History Modal] Selection Button is not aligned with other items
    • Bug 1434245 – Use defineLazyModuleGetters more often with PlacesUtils
  • Lebar changed a string in downloads context menus from “Open Containing Folder” to “Show in Folder” on non-Mac platforms.
  • 🌟Kz04px separated the play and mute tab menu icons and functionality.

• 🌟Jon Barson removed the Persona section from about:telemetry and included non-default ports in site permission prompts.

• Shaoting Huang improved contrast in the Enhanced Tracking Protection panel in high contrast modes.

• 🌟Onyinye Ezike fixed an error in the DevTools Netmonitor “Copy as cURL” output.

• 🌟Alessia Vanni fixed an intermittent failure in browser_net_url-preview.js

• 🌟Angelina fixed a layout issue in DevTools Netmonitor.

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

Addon Manager & about:addons

• John Bieling contributed a fix to about:addons to ensure that about:addons “Languages” category listview will be pointing the user to the language section on addons.mozilla.org when all langpacks has been uninstalled and the about:addons Languages category listview is the currently selected view – Bug 1737875

WebExtensions Framework

• Fixed an intermittent issue on opening unpacked extensions’ browserAction popups – Bug 1735899 in Firefox 95
  • This issue was actually related to a pre-existing issue, only revealed after we fixed Bug 1706594 (and it was triggered by a stale preloaded stylesheet cached entry, which was stuck in the loading state because of a pre-existing bug in RemoteLazyInputStream::Close)
• Mathew Hodson got rid of the remaining uses of “ChromeUtils.import(…, null)” in the WebExtensions framework internals – Bug 1531368 (and Bug 1733851, Bug 1733871, Bug 1733883, Bug 1733886).
• Tomislav landed a fix for a regression related to the sender.url value sent along with the messages sent from a content script using the WebExtensions messaging APIs – Bug 1734984 (originally introduced from Bug 1729395)

WebExtension APIs

• :dw-dev contributed a fix for the “browserSettings.zoomSiteSpecific.set” WebExtensions API method (which ensures that the controlled browser setting is going to be reset as expected when an extension using this API is uninstalled) – Bug 1735047

Downloads Panel

• With the new Downloads Panel experience enabled, work is ongoing on the issues that people are finding on Nightly
• Ava, this past summer’s outreachy intern, is also continuing to work on download spam protection.

Fission

• No showstoppers detected! Slow rollout to release should begin next week!
• Test harnesses now have to explicitly enable/disable Fission

Form Autofill

• Thanks to Leslie (:lesore0789) for removing some extraneous comments
• :tgiles fixed credit card autofilling on zalando.de, at least for the credit card expiry month not filling as expected

Desktop Integrations (Installer & Updater)

• Firefox msix package is being readied to be present on the Microsoft store for both windows 10 and 11
  • S mode will be disabled for this release
• Thanks to :nalexander , :ryanvm, and :bhearsum for pushing through the last iterations
• :bytesized enhanced browser update popup notification

Lint, Docs and Workflow

• ESLint will now warn against uses of nsIScriptableUnicodeConverter – use TextEncoder or TextDecoder instead. Thanks to OnuohaOluebube for writing the rule here.
• ESLint now lints sjs files. Thanks to Jane for implementing.
  • Some rules are currently warnings, which we will fix in future.
• ESLint rule no-loss-of-precision has been enabled across the tree. Thanks to Riya.
  • ESLint 8 is turning this on as a recommended rule, so it is useful to have this landed.
• We’ve been working towards removing the second argument (this/null) to ChromeUtils.import which allowed access to the backstage pass – something we’ll need for switching to es6 modules.
  • Mathew Hodson did a set of patches (bugs) for the extensions code base.
  • Miriam fixed password manager tests.
  • Standard8 fixed the remaining production code uses.
• OS.File removals
  • Jane fixed the Attribution Code (used in startup!).
  • Claudia fixed the BrowserGlue.jsm code (also used in startup!)

macOS Spotlight

• Fixed a performance issue affecting users with pinned tabs in fullscreen mode. UI jank occurred when the user moused to the top of the screen to reveal the menu bar (bug 1701929).
• Users with M1 Macs can now import bookmarks from Safari on startup (bug 1735140).

Password Manager

• Thanks to onuohamiriam44 and :standard8 for removing the second argument to ChromeUtils.import in password manager tests
• :tgiles fixed an issue where extraneous commas were being added to generated passwords if you were on a site that used the improved password generation method
• :dimi is working on isolating sites that users are logged in to or have passwords saved for using Android Fission

Search and Navigation

• Daisuke fixed telemetry for the New Tab Page search field hand-off to the Address Bar, so that search counts are appropriately counted – Bug 1732429
• Harry fixed the search mode indicator colors in high contrast mode – Bug 1735643
• Thanks to all the contributors from the community:
  • Simon Farre contributed a patch improving performance of some tokenization in the address bar. Bug 1726853
  • Tanju Brunostar contributed a patch fixing searches for “.de” or “.com” in the address bar trying to visit a page instead of searching – Bug 1724473
  • Leslie contributed a patch fixing high contrast hover state of the shield/lock icons – Bug 1737054