These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 110

Highlights

• Several new updates for DevTools
  • CSS Property Value: Colin Cazabet added the ability to increase/decrease a CSS property value (e.g. dimensions) by dragging the mouse over the CSS property value  (bug)
    • Like with ArrowUp/Down, you can use Alt / Shift to change the speed of the increase

You can now adjust CSS property values by dragging your mouse cursor!

• Compatibility panel: The MDN browser data is moving to RemoteSettings to allow us to update it outside of the release cycle (bug) We are also planning to use RemoteSettings for list of devices in the RDM mode to support migration to GCP.

Browser compatibility data will be able to be updated outside of the release cycle!

• Console performance: We are making progress on the virtual viewport, fixing remaining functional issues before trying to make it pass the tests (bug). This should make the Console panel significantly faster. We are also working on other performance  improvements related to: logpoints and conditional breakpoints, using mutable map (to avoid expensive Map ctor), etc.
• Documentation: Fixing links pointing to DevTools documentation. Note that entire user documentation has been moved to https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/devtools-user/
  • Documentation for contributors is also available there: https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/devtools/index.html
• We have re-landed the work to enable address autofill independently of credit card autofill and re-landed the work to enable credit card autofill in UK, FR, and DE!
• Niklas has added a site-specific adapter for preliminary support of YouTube subtitles and captions in the PiP player window and Katherine made our support for WebVTT cues in the PiP player window more reliable. Support for Netflix and Prime Video coming soon!
  • Reminder that this is disabled by default, but can be tested by setting `media.videocontrols.picture-in-picture.display-text-tracks.enabled` to `true`.
• If you’re using the Web Developer mode of the Gecko Profiler, you now have the option to sanitize the data from non-active tabs while sharing the profile publicly (github #3881).
  

  Sanitize those tabs. And your hands.

Friends of the Firefox team

Introductions/Shout-Outs

• mcheang is introducing James Teow (Search team)!
  • Background as a designer, transitioned to software developer, excited to be here on the Search team!

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

Script to find new contributors from bug list

Volunteers that fixed more than one bug

• Arpit Jain [:osBins]
• Claudia Batista [:claubatista]
• Jonas Jenwald [:Snuffleupagus]
• Masatoshi Kimura [:emk]
• Shane Hughes [:aminomancer]

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

• 🌟 Arpit Jain fixed network-monitor “Block” button padding and updated fixing-bugs doc for CSS changes and
• 🌟 burnha42 added pref for UI changes to Reader Mode for MSU Capstone
• 🌟 Jintao Hu substituted null language value with string ‘unknown-language’
• 🌟 Janvi Bajoria updated “Go to existing entry” link from the duplicate notification to be accessible with keyboard navigation
• Jonas Jenwald fixed spinner loading indefinitely after dismissing password prompt on a password protected file
• kabakert fixed Reader mode displays “Failed to load article from page” when reloading this page
• 🌟 Emily Michaels added keyboard toggle for narrate in Reader Mode
• Patrick Demers added middle click on filename should shortcut to open link in new tab in Devtools

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

Addon Manager & about:addons

• mkaply added support for the “sitepermission” addon type to the enterprise policy settings – Bug 1741909

WebExtensions Framework

• • Fixed crash on content scripts calling “Cache::Put” with a fetch Response that belong to an expanded principal – Bug 1753810
  • As part of the ongoing ManifestVersion 3 work:
    • Bug 1753308 – changes to AddonTestUtils and ExtensionTestUtils test helpers to make it easier to write tests for the non-persistent background scripts (event pages or background service workers)

• NOTE: as part of this change the legacy pref “extensions.webextensions.background-delayed-startup” has been removed

• • Bug 1748548 – Added persistency to privacy and browserSettings API events (so that an extension non persistent background page or background service worker will can be respawned when these events are being fired)

Developer Tools

• DevTools Context Menu: Emilio fixed an issue with context menu popup in DevTools when the toolbox was zoomed (bug)
• Debugger: Working on fixing zombie breakpoints, to collect as many STRs as possible (bug). We are also expanding our test coverage to cover more user scenarios and avoid regressions.
  • ochameau already fixed a very visible issue that was impacting the debugger in the Browser Toolbox (bug)

Password Manager

• :sgalich recently removed all non-user-facing references to “master” password in our codebase
• :sgalich fixed an issue where about:logins couldn’t be scrolled if the screen was resized to a smaller size
• :sgalich fixed an issue where the import summary report page’s layout was not behaving as expected after importing logins via CSV
• :dimi fixed an issue where the username-only form detection logic would try to process an unlimited amount of username-only likely forms
• Thanks to :janvi01 for fixing a keyboard navigation issue on about:logins

Picture-in-Picture

• mhowell made it much easier to resize the player window on Windows!
• Niklas has added a site-specific adapter for preliminary support of YouTube subtitles and captions in the PiP player window
  • Reminder that this is disabled by default, but can be tested by setting `media.videocontrols.picture-in-picture.display-text-tracks.enabled` to `true`.
• Katherine made our support for WebVTT cues in the PiP player window more reliable
• Niklas has a patch to add preliminary support for Netflix subtitles and captions
• Katherine is working on a patch to add responsive styling to PiP captions and subtitles
• Katherine has a preliminary patch for adding subtitles / caption support for Prime Video

Performance Tools (aka Firefox Profiler)

• “Performance Tools Newsletter (Q4 2021)” is out now. Check it out to see the improvements we’ve done to the Firefox Profiler in the past quarter.
• Base profiler (pre-xul) and gecko profiler (xul) tracks are merged now (Bug 1753192, Bug 1745281). They were using different profiler buffers before but they are using the same buffer now. Example startup profile
  • Before:

Multi-track timeline!

• • After:

Single track timeline!

• “DllLoad” markers are visible on all threads and everywhere now when Firefox is loading some DLLs on Windows (not only on early startup) (Bug 1524625). Example profile
  
  
  

  Example DllLoad marker

  New “Awake” markers for thread wakeups. It also includes how much CPU is spent while thread is awake (Bug 1745281, Bug 1524625). Example profile
  

  

  Example Awake marker

  “Rust API for the Firefox Profiler” blog post is out. Take a look at it if you would like to learn more about the API and some of the implementation details.

• French locale is 100% translated now and it’s enabled on Firefox Profiler (github 3885).

Search and Navigation

• Drew and Daisuke have started on a new “Best Match” feature for Firefox Suggest in various bugs (Bug 1755057)
• Mandys work on Search Engine Removal has landed and last of its bugs being finished up (Bug 1755740)
• Dao has started work on improving the visibility and consistency of focus rings across all platforms (Bug 1756002)