These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 106

Highlights

• We’re planning on shipping Credit Card Autofill to the UK, France, and Germany in Firefox Nightly 97! (bug)
• MSU students just wrapped up a capstone project to improve high contrast mode. Thanks to them for hacking on this and making Firefox better for folks who use it!
  • Project video
• Thanks to Mandy, who made switch-to-tab results in the AwesomeBar use adaptive behavior, so the next time you’re searching for a tab it may be higher in the results list! – (bug)
• The Performance Tools team has made improvements to the profiler, including improved keyboard navigation and a new search filter for the tracks context menu.
  • Improved the tracks context menu:
    • Moved the tracks context menu button to the left side of the timeline.

• • • Added a search filter, so you can find the tracks you are looking for easily.

• Special thanks to Richa Sharma who contributed two new “contextual identities” (also known as “containers”) related additions to the Extension APIs:
  • The first allows developers to register content scripts that match only documents loaded in a specified set of containers (given an array of the userContextId to match) – (bug)
  • The second made it so that tabs.query can now be used to query tabs that belong to a specified set of containers instead of just one (using an array of the userContextId to match instead of a single userContextId string value) – (bug)

Friends of the Firefox team

Introductions/Shout-Outs

• Rashelle Hopkins (rhopkinsdev) recently joined us as an Outreachy contributor and will help us improve Picture in Picture until March next year!

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

Fixed more than one bug

• Richa Sharma
• Rashelle

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

• Shaoting Huang updated certificate error page buttons to match Figma spec
• Richa Sharma added support for cookieStoreId option in browser.contentScripts.register and added support for an array of cookieStoreId in the tabs.query API
• Noah Pesta fixed the PiP toggle glitch in High Contrast Mode
• Rashelle cleaned up preference for supporting multiple PiP windows and disabled right and middle-click events inside the PIP window and removed unnecessary `browser_closePipAfterCloseBrowser.js` test for Picture-in-Picture

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

Fission

• The patches for enabling Fission by default in Nightly have landed, but there’s a slight hiccup: locally built instances of Firefox launched with `./mach run` don’t get Fission enabled. This is being tracked here.

Form Autofill

• :tgiles fixed credit card autofilling where there are four credit card number fields in one form 
• :tgiles fixed American Express cards not being selected when autofilling due to the <select> option value being “American Express”

Lint, Docs and Workflow

• ESLint now recognises the structuredClone global function (added in Firefox 94).

Password Manager

• :tgiles has removed the Lockwise branding from the browser (minus about:protections but that’s expected)

Picture-in-Picture

• Outreachy intern Rashelle Hopkins will be joining us to help improve the Picture-in-Picture feature! Rashelle recently contributed the context menu option that allows moving the toggle from the right side to the left.
• Congratulations to mtigley and mhowell who are co-owning the Picture-in-Picture toolkit component with me, and another congratulations to niklas and kpatenio who are now peers of that component!
  • Submodule
• We’re working with Ania from the Product team to groom the backlog for improvements to Picture-in-Picture in 2022. Stay tuned!

Performance

• Standard8 has landed a patch that ensures that OSFile.jsm never loads before first paint of the first window! This is the culmination of much work from several people to make it possible to replace OSFile.

Performance Tools

• WebrtcWorker threads will always be visible even though they have low activity because they are nearly always important when they are recorded in a profile. Thanks to padenot for changing this!
• Firefox Profiler will not sanitize the profiles from external tools by default. But you can always check the checkboxes back to sanitize them if you want to. This is done because previously it was more likely to lose important information when they are always checked.

Search and Navigation

• Mark fixed reloading search-config on Firefox updates, if the local dump is newer than the current engines configuration. This ensures engines are up-to-date, even if Remote Settings cannot update them – Bug 1742788
• Daisuke fixed a visual glitch with some Firefox Suggest results breaking in small windows – Bug 1743369
• Daisuke fixed the Firefox Suggest onboarding dialog to not overflow when using larger system fonts – Bug 1730692
• Drew fixed a problem where sometimes the Address Bar was showing 11 results instead of 10 – Bug 1743008