A View to a Better, Faster Web – These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 143

Highlights

• Mozilla published its standards position on the Web Environment Integrity API proposal draft put forward by the Google Chrome team.
• A new version of Firefox View is in Nightly behind the browser.tabs.firefox-view-next pref; it is still a Work-in-Progress but it’s undergoing QA testing now
  • The new version includes sections to show your recent browsing, your currently open and recently closed tabs, tabs from other devices, and browsing history.
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• The Necko team has landed some HTTP/2 upload speed improvements, and we’re seeing results with significant improvements in the 50th percentile and higher on Firefox 115 (the results are from Beta)! Details here.
• We’re now apparently beating Chrome on the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark!
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  • Source
• Credit card autofill support has now been enabled in more regions in Nightly
  • Mtigley enabled credit card autofill in ES and IT in Nightly
  • Dimi enabled credit card autofill in AT, BE, and PL in Nightly
  • If you encounter specific sites that don’t work well with credit card autofill, add them to this metabug
• Nicolas tweaked the appearance of nested rules in the inspector to better match the authored text (bug)
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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]

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

• 🌟 Felix Lefebvre added second argument support to helper functions
• 🌟 gresunta made ratings row visible if reviewURL exists
• Vinny Diehl allow resizing the area selected by measuring tool via keyboard

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

Addon Manager & about:addons

• Thanks to Tim Giles for fixing the regression tracked by Bug 1840953 – Link in add-on recommendation heading has incorrect text
  • NOTE: the fix has been applied on the moz-support-link custom element side, which will not be overriding the text content of the element with its default “Learn more” string when the element has a data-l10n-name attribute set.
• Thanks to Gregor Sunta contributed fix, about:addons cards will now be showing a rating URL when there is a “review URL” associated with an add-on, even if the add-on doesn’t have any rating yet – Bug 1841619

WebExtensions Framework

• As part of work to introduce explicit extension process crash handling: we applied changes to the background page state tracking and transitions to make sure the extension process will be respawned automatically for extensions using an event page as their background script when one of their persisted listeners have been triggered after the extension process crash – Bug 1762225.
• As part of fixing a regression related to the encrypted IndexedDB storage enabled in Firefox 115 for web pages running in private browsing mode: we re-introduced an explicit exception raised when an extension page running in private browsing mode tries to open an IndexedDB database so that the extensions can then fallback to browser.storage.local as they were doing before Firefox 115 – Bug 1841806.

WebExtension APIs

• Fixed storage.onChanged events wrongly emitted to extension content scripts on changes to the storage.session data – Bug 1842009.

Developer Tools

DevTools

• Contributors
  • Vinny Dieh added keyboard support for resizing the area drawn with the measuring tool and updated the documentation (bug)
  • Gregory Pappas removed the preference we had to enable DOM Breakpoints, since they’re enabled for a while  (bug)
  • Felix Lefebvre added a second argument to the $ and $$ console helpers, which is the container element in which the query will happen (bug)
• Nicolas made the console ignore console.clear() call when the “Enable persistent logs” is enabled (bug)
• Hubert added HTTP proxy information in the Netmonitor headers panel (bug)
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• Hubert fixed an issue where preview popup were not displayed module scripts (bug), which got us a nice 5 to 10% improvement for debugger opening ((alert)
• Alex is still refactoring of the Debugger codebase to make it more stable and easier to work with (bug,bug,bug,bug)
• Nicolas fixed issues in the rule view when using CSS variables (bug, bug)
• Nicolas fixed erroneous “overridden property” information in the rules view and the computed panel for rules that were using @layer and important (bug, bug)
• Nicolas added inactive CSS indication on highlight pseudo-elements (e.g. ::selection) for unsupported properties (bug)
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WebDriver BiDi

• Henrik implemented the browsingContext.setViewport command, which allows to change the dimensions of the viewport (bug)
• Julian added the serialization of headers and cookies to match the latest specification changes, which makes it easier to support non-UTF8 values (bug)
• Julian updated various events and commands to return a consistent “navigation id” if they are related to a specific navigation. This way, users can initiate a navigation and easily find the corresponding browsing context and network events. (bug, bug, bug and bug)
• Sasha implemented the browsingContext.fragmentNavigated event, which monitors same-document navigation such as hash changes (bug)
• Sasha added support for the clip argument to browsingContext.captureScreenshot, which can be used to restrict the screenshot to a specific area or to a given Element (bug)

ESMification status

• ESMified status:
  • browser: 85%
  • toolkit: 99%
  • Total:  95.13% (up from 94.64%)
• #esmification on Matrix

Information Management

• Persistence of recently closed tabs in the new Firefox View has landed in Nightly (behind the browser.sessionstore.persist_closed_tabs_between_sessions pref)

Lint, Docs and Workflow

• Newtab’s ESLint configuration has been simplified & improved.
  • Previously some files were incorrectly identified as being in the wrong environments.
  • The configuration was structured for being a separate repository (which it originally was), now it uses the m-c configuration in the normal way.

Migration Improvements

• We’re on track to ship an experiment to a small set of the Firefox 116 release population that enables Chrome extension importing.
• mconley landed some refactoring to make the migration wizard easier to embed. This made it easier to embed the wizard in the new Firefox View, for example!
• mconley also fixed a bug where importing from Safari would be broken if no bookmarks existed in the profile and if the password file for CSV import was empty

Search and Navigation

• Standard8 did an optimization to catch when the responsetype is an invalid JSON for search suggestions urls – Bug 1016808 – Use XMLHttpRequest’s responseType = “json” for search suggestions
• Marc fixed a bug where entering characters with character or accent marks on macOS doesn’t remove the autofill selected part. Bug 1512013
• Daisuke fixed a bug where the cursor jumps to the beginning of the address bar after tab swap.  Bug 1512013
• Daisuke fixed a bug where copying some text, the user middle clicks on a bookmark to open it in a new tab and it results in the copied text pasted in the address bar rather than opening a new tab with nothing pasted into the address bar. Bug 1838743
• Marco fixed a massive performance regression in Nightly for address bar where noticeable delay occurred after entering a character in the address bar. Bug 1842381
• Gijs helped fix a regression where search shortcuts table in about:settings were missing headers. Bug 1842547
• Marco did some refactoring promises and reduced flicker in the address bar. Bug 1843074, Bug 1843100
• Daisuke has been doing some work with Pocket suggestions by appending UTM parameters to Pocket collection urls. Bug 1843186
• Dale fixed a bug where rich suggestions disappear when there’s a duplicated heuristic suggestion because we are deduplicating the rich suggestion with heuristic results. We’ve avoided deduplicating the rich with non-rich suggestions to fix the issue. Bug 1843386