A Bountiful Blend of Browser Betterments – These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 138

Highlights

• WebExtensions
  • In Firefox 114, extension widgets listed in the extensions panel can be reordered through the menu “Move up” / “Move down” context menu actions (Bug 1805924)
  • Support for the `storage.session` WebExtensions API has been introduced starting in Firefox 115 (Bug 1823713)
• Picture-in-Picture
  • janvi restored PiP captions support for sonyliv
  • kpatenio added PiP captions support for TubiTV Live
• Nicolas added the version number of unsupported browsers in the Inspector compatibility panel (bug)
  • 
• Starting in Firefox 115, thanks to steven w it’s now possible to import form autofill entries from Chrome-based browsers.

Friends of the Firefox team

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

Script to find new contributors from bug list

Volunteers that fixed more than one bug

• Gregory Pappas [:gregp]
• Itiel
• Mathew Hodson
• Pier Angelo Vendrame

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

• steven w imported form autofill entries from Chrome-based browsers

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

WebExtensions Framework

• Fixed NativeMessaging API regression due to missing Unix-style path normalization on Windows (introduced by Bug 1772932 in Firefox 114, and fixed by Bug 1830605 in the same Nightly cycle)
• Starting from Firefox 114, a deprecation warning will be logged when `browser_style: true` is being used for the MV3 extension manifests (Bug 1827910, Bug 1832578)
  • Next steps of the deprecation plan are briefly described in Bug 1827910 comment 1
• Extensions Button
  • Itiel contributed some more cleanups to the extensions button/panel CSS (Bug 1818622), thanks Itiel!

Developer Tools

DevTools

• Canadahonk made it possible to display support conditions for `@import` CSS rules in the Rule view (bug)
  • `layout.css.import-supports.enabled`
• arai improved eager evaluation in Worker (bug)
• Blackboxing in debugger was improved:
  • Hubert updated styling of ignored sources (bug)
  • He also added an option to hide blackboxed sources in the sources tree (bug)
  • Alex made jsTracing Ignore blackboxed sources (bug)
• Speaking of tracing, stdout traces now have hyperlinks which can be opened in the Firefox debugger (bug)
• Alex made stepping in the callstack more consistent when dealing generated and original sources (bug)
• Alex fixed a bug in the inspector that would break markup view search when an iframe had node children, which is something uBlock does on some elements it blocks (bug)
• Nicolas fixed an issue in console that would create an infinite loop in parent process on very short-lived documents (bug)

WebDriver BiDi

• Julian made it possible to use elements as reference for an action (e.g. click on a specific element instead of a click at given viewport coordinates) (bug)
• Sasha vendored puppeteer v20.1.0 (bug)

ESMification status

• ESMified status:
  • browser: 68%
  • toolkit: 87%
  • Total: 81.6% (up from 75.5%)
• #esmification on Matrix
• Migration Document (with a walkthrough!)

Lint, Docs and Workflow

• The enabling of Prettier on JSON files has now landed.
• Gijs has landed stylelint for css linting.
  • This will flag up errors in your CSS, like duplicate properties, invalid syntax, missing generic font families, etc. In some cases it can auto-fix things.
  • We will expand this in the next few weeks/months to cover conventions in use in Firefox (e.g. using “em” for font-size over “px”, preferring logical over physical margin/padding/border/float definitions, using “0” without a unit for sizes, etc.)
  • This is not a formatter like prettier, so it doesn’t currently adjust whitespace, indenting etc.
• `./mach lint .` now works in parallel mode for faster linting. Previously only `./mach lint *` would work, but that didn’t pick up the top-level dot files.
• Next up, is to upgrade Prettier and enable it for production HTML files.
  • The upgrade does change a significant number of JS files due to changes in Prettier’s formatting.
  • We decided to put off enabling it on test files for now, due to the large amount of files affected.

Migration Improvements

• mconley fixed an issue with a misleading string in our macOS permission request instructions when importing from Safari
• Importing payment methods from Chrome has landed and bounced a few times. Currently debugging test failures on macOS.

New Tab Page

• kpatenio restored underlines for URLs as default to respect use of color accessibility criterion

Picture-in-Picture

• niklas improved video detection for the urlbar entrypoint
• emilio fixed a PiP window regression with Microsoft PowerToys layout manager / FancyZones

Search and Navigation

• Hannah has added a Copy Clean context menu option to the urlbar input field, when the strip-on-share feature is enabled (stripping tracking params from the query string).
• Daisuke is implementing Add-ons suggestions and their result menu in the urlbar (not enabled yet)
• Drew added a Thank You message to urlbar results when the user provides feedback through the result menu, and fixed a bug with the feedback option
• Dao has cleaned up Result menus Nimbus variables since the feature is being released
• Drew refactored Firefox Suggest code to support more result types and settings

Storybook/Reusable Components

• tgiles recently updated the existing documentation on how to create a new UI widget and the differences between UI widgets and Domain-specific widgets
  • Reusable UI widgets — Firefox Source Docs documentation
  • Storybook for Firefox — Firefox Source Docs documentation
• hjones landed support for moz-toggle in PanelMultiView to support replacing the ETP toggle and adding a new toggle for when PiP is disabled