These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 109

Highlights

• Since the compatibility panel is also riding the 98 train, we polished it a bit: we added support for Internet Explorer 11 data (bug), reworked the tooltip for compatibility issues (bug) and last but not least, updated Firefox icon  (bug)

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    Cool people make sure their sites work in as many browser engines as possible.

• The new performance panel is riding the train and will be enabled in Firefox release 98 (bug). The new panel will make it easier for web developers to record and share profiles as it opens a new profiler.firefox.com tab when capturing the profile. Many thanks to jwajsberg who fixed the last issues that were blocking this.

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    A long overdue overhaul of the DevTools Performance Panel is riding out to users soon!

• Claudia, our DevTools Outreachy intern, is about to enable the new “Edit and resend” panel of the Network Monitor on Nightly 🎉 (bug)

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    A new fancy Edit and Resend panel for the DevTools Network Monitor tool!

• Support of WebVTT captions is coming for Picture-in-Picture! The patch is in Nightly but it’s off by default – there’s still quite a bit of work to do. If you’re curious, you can test our progress by setting media.videocontrols.picture-in-picture.display-text-tracks.enabled to true in about:config.
• CTA for our Nightly testing community: help us test website compatibility for when Firefox reaches v100! In about:preferences#experimental, there is a toggle that lets you use the v100 UA string ahead of time. See issues with sites with the v100 on, but not when it’s off? File a webcompat.org bug and let us know!

Friends of the Firefox team

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

Script to find new contributors from bug list

Volunteers that fixed more than one bug

• Claudia Batista [:claubatista]
• Jane Kotovich (:janey)
• Jintao Hu
• Masatoshi Kimura [:emk]
• Shane Hughes [:aminomancer]

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

• 🌟  Hikota Nakatani [:hikota] fixed highlighting for selected item in Functions dropdown switcher in Dev Tools Debugger
• 🌟 Jintao Hu added bottom margin to block images in Reader Mode and fixed horizontal scrolling for wide tables in Reader Mode
• Lebar added call to ensureRowIsVisible to make sure that selected node is in view after showInFolder
• Noel Lefevre added a fix that ensures that clickToPlay has an aria-label attribute

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

WebExtensions Framework

• As part of the ongoing ManifestVersion 3 work (Proposal: Limited Event Pages for MV3 · Issue #134 · w3c/webextensions · GitHub), we have started to introduce support for the non-persistent background page (also known as EventPage):
  • Bug 1748524 (initial set of changes to support non-persistent background page, currently gated by the ‘extensions.eventPages.enabled’ about:config preference)
  • Bug 1748541 (WebExtensions API Events internal refactoring, used in follow up patches to extend “persisting and priming of the API event listeners” to more WebExtensions APIs on extensions using a non persistent background script, either an event page or a service worker)
  • Bug 1748547 (persist alarm listeners to allow them to respawn the background script if fired after it has been terminated)
• Thanks to Barret, the ‘pkcs11’ WebExtensions API does not use osfile.jsm anymore – Bug 1745352

Developer Tools

• Hikota fixed a contrast issue when using the debugger command palette in dark mode (bug)
• Angelina made it possible to open links displayed in the headers panel of the network monitor (bug)
• Long time contributor sebo started to work on Custom Formatters for DevTools (bug), with funding from the Clojurist Together Foundation. Custom Formatters are a way for content pages to control how objects will be rendered in DevTools (console, debugger, …). It’s especially useful for debugging library custom data, like Immutable or ClojureScript.
• We fixed a nasty bug where DevTools would freeze when trying to inspect an iframe blocked by CSP (bug). Thanks Christoph Kerschbaumer for helping us on that.
• Julian fixed an issue about:debugging where the tab list wasn’t updated properly (bug)
• You can now see CSS layers data displayed in the rule view (bug). We took this opportunity to change how we display media queries data (bug), and display the full list of nested media queries/layers (bug)

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    Layers. Like an onion!

• bomsy and ochameau are working on making the debugger more reliable and already landed a few patches to make the codebase easier to navigate and the test more robust and legible.

Form Autofill

• tgiles fixed an issue where the save/update panel for credit cards would always show a generic credit card logo
• tgiles is working on enabling credit card autofill in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany due to multiple back outs.
• Dimi is working on using Fathom to recognize credit card fields which will deliver better accuracy than our current heuristics approach

New Tab Page

• Bug 1749583 – [Dão] added colorways section placeholder in about:newtab’s personalize panel behind a pref (browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.colorway-closet.enabled).

Password Manager

• Dimi is working on an issue that involves slow loading of large HTML tables due to our username only form detection logic

Picture-in-Picture

• We’re going to experiment with different toggle behaviours for first-time users of Picture-in-Picture, and have added telemetry for that.

Performance Tools (aka Firefox Profiler)

• Support profiling of private browsing windows (github #3671, bugzilla #1639716)
• Enable the new performance devtools panel by default in release (bugzilla 1451902)
• Performance improvements when there are a lot of threads (github #3813, #3829, #3842)
• Improvements in the range selection behavior
• Syntax highlighting for the new source view – (#3794) thanks Markus! Link to a profile

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    The syntax highlighting makes the source much easier to read.

• Experimental support for per-process CPU usage capturing
  • Enable the “Process CPU Utilization” feature in about:profiling first.
  • Then in the profiler viewer, open the console and run experimental.enableProcessCPUTracks()
• Use ResizeObserver instead of DOM resize events to track window resizes, which fixes a few issues and improves performance
• Fixes in how we capture the data from subprocesses: previously we were simply waiting for a timeout which could be a problem on slower machines, now we’re getting progress information which makes it possible to wait longer (Bugzilla 1673513)
• Enable stackwalking on MacOS – always (Bugzilla 1753272). On ARM64 you’ll get all stacks, in Nightly and Beta too. For release x86-64… maybe soon?

Search and Navigation

• Bug 1749397 and Bug 1751819 – When you type a url in the urlbar or the searchbar, press enter, and press a character, that character gets inputted. For example, “google.com” and enter, and “t”, which becomes “google.comt”. This was fixed by [daisuke].
• Bug 1752251 – Drew [adw] implemented best match rows in the urlbar view, these rows have a large 52×52 icon with title and URL vertically centred. This is on en-US only for now and is always part of quick suggest results.

Screenshots

• Thanks Neil for the fix of Bug 1744779 – Failing to download file due to missing filename sanitation