These Weeks In Firefox: Issue 111

Highlights

• The Firefox Profiler team has added a dynamic language switcher! (#3905, #3910)

Switching languages in Firefox Profiler has never been easier!

• Volunteer contributor aminomancer changed the default seek time for video and audio elements (and for when using the cursors in the PiP player window) from 15 seconds to 5 seconds! Thanks aminomancer!
• Downloads Panel improvements are shipping to users today in Firefox 98! Check out the release notes for details on the changes.
• The Developer Tools team has improved `console.log` performance by up to 9%! (alert, bug & bug)
• Mark has addressed a case where removed search engines could reappear after a Firefox Update – Bug 1691706
  • A big thank you to user mjr who persisted and managed to get an actionable log a year after they first filed the bug.

Friends of the Firefox team

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

Volunteers that fixed more than one bug

• Claudia Batista [:claubatista]
• Shane Hughes [:aminomancer]
• Zachary Svoboda :zacnomore

New contributors ( = first patch)

• ccraig8 improved internal documentation for the resistfingerprinting API
• kabakert changed Reader Mode color theme to follow browser content theme
• Sven Assmann (he/him) added ESC key to exit picture-in-picture fullscreen mode

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

WebExtensions Framework

•  As part of the ongoing Manifest Version 3 work:
  • new “scripting” WebExtensions API namespace:
    • Added support for dynamically registered content scripts – Bug 1736581, Bug 1736582, Bug 1736584, Bug 1756495 and
    • Added support for the runAt option – Bug 1755978
  • More of the ongoing work related to Event Pages (non-persistent background pages) and persistent API Events listeners landed in Firefox 99 – Bug 1748550, Bug 1755589
• Internal refactoring to consolidate addons’ computed isPrivileged property into a single place (blocker for other internal refactorings, e.g. moving builtin themes localization to fluent, tracked by Bug 1733466) – Bug 1734987

Developer Tools

• Compatibility Panel: The browsers data are now stored in RemoteSettings (bug). We’re working on having those synced automatically from @mdn/browser-compat-data to give our users the freshest data we can.
• Debugger: We are expanding our test coverage and taking this opportunity to make them better overall (added eslint, more logs, cleanup helpers, …)

Lint, Docs and Workflow

• We now have a set of patches for stopping using null as the target object argument to ChromeUtils.import. This stops these locations from importing from the backstage pass, which is something we won’t be able to do when we switch to es6 modules.
  • These are in the review process & starting to land soon.
• We also have patches to stop using {} and remove unnecessary passing of objects via the target argument.
  • The eventual aim is to remove the second argument to ChromeUtils.import

macOS Spotlight

• Scroll snapping has been fixed on macOS Monterey

Picture-in-Picture

• kpatenio fixed an issue with the behaviour of the close button in the player window when the originating window is in the background
• kpatenio also added more responsive styling for subtitles and captions
• kpatenio also fixed an issue with the PiP toggle being too close to the edge of the video element in certain circumstances
• niklas is reviving / refining a bunch of Telemetry for PiP
• niklas is working on keeping PiP tabs in active state when minimized or switched to other tab
• 5422m4n added ESC shortcut support so that we can close the pip window using the escape key

Performance Tools (aka Firefox Profiler)

• Share the libs object between threads — this reduces the size of profiles
• Add the number of operations in the memory’s track’s tooltip (#3915)

The memory track tooltip now displays the number of operations made in Firefox Profiler

• Improved lock contention when capturing cross-thread markers (Bug 1755823)
• Starting/stopping/pausing/resuming the profiler now returns a promise, and we use this in tests, this should lead to less intermittents (Bug 1668867)
• Reminder: Joy Of Profiling matrix channel and meetings (every monday): come and share your profiles!

Search and Navigation

• Best Match feature MVP:
  • Drew fixed the Top Pick preference being visible in about:preferences even if the feature is disabled – Bug 1756162
  • Drew temporarily disabled the blocking option for MVP – Bug 1757488
  • Drew implemented logic to decide whether Quick Suggest results are good candidates for Best Match – Bug 1752604
  • Drew fixed the SuMo URL – Bug 1757622
  • Drew fixed Nimbus and contextual services to better keep track of Best Match results – Bug 1757658,  Bug 1754622
  • Daisuke made so blocked suggestions are not shown anymore – Bug 1754595
  • Daisuke fixed the Preferences UI for Best Match – Bug 1754634, Bug 1756917
• Mark has fixed search engines configuration writes not being atomic anymore – Bug 1758014