These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 116

Highlights

• ESMification is a project to move away from our custom JS module system (JSMs) to the standard ES Module system most are familiar with when writing JavaScript.

• A prototype of loading ESM modules has landed in bug 1432901. We are looking for feedback. Please get in touch with yulia (@yulia on matrix, yulia@mozilla.com) if you would like to discuss any of the above.

• Picture-in-Picture subtitles support has been added for SonyLiv and Dailymotion

• Picture-in-Picture now supports forward/backward seeking with the left/right arrow keys on Netflix

• The address bar used to not convert negative temperatures. Now it does! If you type in -30C to F, it converts it to -22 F. This feature is only available with browser.urlbar.unitConversion.enabled set to true.

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

Script to find new contributors from bug list

Volunteers that fixed more than one bug

• Itiel

• manisha.singh2019

• serge-sans-paille

• Shane Hughes [:aminomancer]

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

• Max added PiP Video-Adapter for handling Dailymotion Subtitles

• 🌟 Jon Rutter removed unnecessary instances of “Object.assign” in “test_getAdaptedProfiles.js

• Noel Lefevre changed width for Reader mode color-scheme-buttons

• Luke Swiderski added log and Edit log on breakpoint in sidebar should scroll line into view

• manisha.singh2019 added covering Focus Ring of text area in Add Address dialog and moved the trending icon used by about:newtab to the shared icon library in browser/themes/shared/icons and made title-text for saved addresses and credit cards readable in dark/light mode

• 🌟 ryu.devcreations centered the pop-up window of Remove All Logins in “about:logins”

General triage

• Gijs, Neil, mconley and jteow are this month’s Firefox / Toolkit::General triagers!

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

Addon Manager & about:addons

• Thanks to Eemeli some remaining localized strings used in about:addons have been migrated to Fluent  – Bug 1507471

WebExtensions Framework and APIs

• As part of the deprecation of the “network.cookie.lifetimePolicy” Firefox about:config preference (Bug 1681493), the privacy.websites.cookieConfig WebExtension API JSONSchema has been updated to mark the “nonPersistentCookies” option as deprecated – Bug 1754924

• As part of the ongoing ManifestVersion 3 work:

  • Fixed missing “action” WebExtensions API namespace on Android builds – Bug 1768839

  • Introduced new telemetry probes related to the extension startupCache usage – Bug 1767336

  • Enforced host permissions checks on content scripts registered using the scripting APIs – Bug 1760451

  • Enabled “scripting” WebExtensions API for ManifestVersion 2 extensions

    • Part of changes introduced for ManifestVersion 2 extensions to help extension developers with transitioning their addons to ManifestVersion 3.

  • Reset the event pages idle timeout when the event page does still have “webRequest.filterReponseData” filters attached to intercepted web requests – Bug 1759300

Developer Tools

• Added filter for list of stylesheets in Browser Toolbox (bug) (Style Editor panel). The user can also use Ctrl/Cmd + p shortcut to focus the input field (bug)

Considering a change of style? The new style sheet filter can help you find what you’re looking for.

• Show frames under their related content process ID (bug)

Reframe your debugging routine by viewing relevant content process IDs (pids) for individual frame targets

• Don’t add expressions evaluated in the Console panel (command line) to history if the browser is running in private mode (bug)

WebDriver BiDi M3 Completed

• Milestone 3 was all about browsing context APIs. The main focus was to deliver the browsingContext.navigate command, which as you can expect allows you to navigate a tab to a given URL. To go along with navigation, we implemented commands to get, create and close browsing contexts. We also added the browsingContext.contextCreated event to be notified about new tabs or windows.

• With the help of the GeckoView team, WebDriver webplatform tests (wdspec) were enabled on Android and we can already test WebDriver BiDi on this platform.

• New command-line arguments were added so that users can specify allowed host and origin headers, which will help to use WebDriver BiDi with various clients or environments.

• Finally, after conducting a security review WebDriver BiDi was enabled on all channels in Firefox 101. Thanks to this, third party tools such as Selenium will now be able to use WebDriver BiDi to control / interact with Firefox.

• With the request from the Application Update team we added support for window-less mode in Marionette. It allows consumers to verify silent restarts of Firefox on MacOS, which means that no browser window will be opened after the restart.

Form Autofill

• Thanks to manisha.singh2019 for fixing a visual focus ring issue in the Add Address dialog!

• Thanks to Jon Rutter for removing unnecessary instances of “Object.assign” in “test_getAdaptedProfiles.js”

• Form Autofill now ignores autocomplete=”off” and will try to fill this fields after heuristics have determined the type of these fields

• :tgiles fixed Form Autofill autofilling into disabled form fields

• :tgiles fixed an issue where forms would be filled with the incorrect expiry date format

• :tgiles fixed an issue where credit cards were not being filled correctly on walmart.com

Lint, Docs and Workflow

• (no voice update this week)

• The ESLint rule no-constant-binary-expression has now been enabled alongside fixing the existing instances where it caught issues.

New Tab Page

• Amy [:achurchwell] removed the placeholder colorways section from about:newtab’s personalized panel.

• Drew [:adw] added a new feature where we exclude URLs with the AMP query parameter from appearing as tiles in the new tab page.

• Scott [sdowne] reduced the number of I/O operations on the new tab page by reducing the attempt to create personality-provider folders. This fix increased performance.

Password Manager

• Thanks to ryu.devcreations for fixing an alignment issue with the “Remove All Logins” pop-up window

• :sgalich enabled showing the save login panel only when the user has interacted with the page

Picture-in-Picture

• janvi01 added a new video wrapper + subtitles support for SonyLiv

• Max added new video wrapper + subtitles support for Dailymotion

• niklas resolved subtitles support issues with Netflix (Bug 1768818, Bug 1768202)

• kpatenio enabled forward/backward seeking via keyboard shortcuts on Netflix

Search and Navigation

• [daisuke] fixed Bug 1457149 on Win64 where Ctrl-L Delete / CTRL-L Backspace does not  clear the address bar when done extremely fast.

• James [:jteow] fixed a  Bug 1560676  where autofill was broken for URLs such as localhost:8888/foo.

• [daisuke] and Drew [:adw] have been working on autofill so that it fills urls not only origins. Bug 1597791

• [daisuke] fixed Bug 1633924 where adaptive results were case sensitive. This was changed so it’s case insensitive. If you typed FIRE or fire the url https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/ will be shown in results

• Mandy [:mcheang] Fixed Bug 1673868 where DDG Ads on Search Result Pages was reported inconsistently.

• Mandy [:mcheang] Did some work for Bug 1759207 to show an infobar for when an application default search engine is removed from configuration.

• [jamie] Fixed a Bug 1761154  for accessibility screen readers. The reader read the first result twice.

• [daisuke] fixed Bug 1761154  where the address bar does not convert negative temperatures. Now it does. If you type in -30C to F, it converts it to -22 F. This feature is only available with browser.urlbar.unitConversion.enabled set to true.

• Drew [:adw] on Bug 1765595 added a Nimbus variable to load Fx Suggest suggestions with a different type on Remote settings.

• Mark [:standard8] removed osfile.jsm usage from search because of new linting rules for Bug 1769047 .

Screenshots

• [niklas] I landed the initial patch for the draggable overlay. Set `screenshots.browser.component.enabled` to true to test out the new screenshots component!

ESMification status

• ESMification is a project to move away from our custom JS module system (JSMs) to the standard ES Module system most are familiar with when writing JavaScript.

• A prototype of loading ESM modules has landed in bug 1432901, it is now possible to load modules synchronously for system code (in progress example for a content/system component).

• The team is working on a lazy module API similar to defineLazyModuleGetters & co.

• There are a couple of questions around the API and naming that are currently being explored.

• We are looking at a migration in H2.

• We are looking for feedback. Please get in touch with yulia (@yulia on matrix, yulia@mozilla.com) if you would like to discuss any of the above.