More WebExtensions! Coming to an Android near you soon – These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 147

Highlights

• Extensions process support in Firefox Android is going to ride the Gecko 120 release train (tracked by Bug 1859533). This has been one of the many things blocking full support for WebExtensions on Firefox for Android.
  • The plan is to allow users on Firefox for Android to install any supported WebExtension on addons.mozilla.org in the coming months! If you’re an addon developer, see this blog post for details.
• pbz added a new button for clearing your session in Private Browsing windows, enabled by default in Nightly

Clear your session in the press of a button!

• Marc added the ability to search all existing tabs from the URL bar, regardless of which container the tab is in
• Nicolas fixed many accessibility bugs in the Firefox DevTools. You can follow along in this progress chart!

Friends of the Firefox team

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

Script to find new contributors from bug list

Volunteers that fixed more than one bug

• Ganna
• Itiel
• Mathew Hodson
• Sebastian Zartner [:sebo]

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

• Sebastian [:sebcode] added a check for profile before opening an url on macOS
• anonymous0000007 removed an unused variable in crashreporter.cpp
• 🌟 Fideliu does not use PROCESS_MODE_BACKGROUND_BEGIN to run the minidum-analyzer in the background on Windows
• vitaspiros removed signons.sqlite references

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

WebExtensions Framework

• Extensions process support in Firefox Android
  • Most of the work on the extensions process crash handling logic started in Firefox 117 and has been improved in 118, 119 and 120. This process has already been enabled for 100% of Beta and Nightly populations for a while (Nimbus rollouts) as well as on 118 Release for ~1% of the population.
  • This work initially prioritised for Firefox Android has also been contributing to handle extension process crashes on Firefox Desktop (Bug 1355239)

WebExtension APIs

• Fixed behavior of the match_about_blank / matchAboutBlank content script configuration property: in Gecko < 120, when this flag is set to true, the related content script is implicitly injected in all top level about:blank pages. Starting with Gecko >= 120, it is going to be injected into top level about:blank pages only if the extension is also granted the <all_urls> permission – Bug 1853409

Addon Manager & about:addons

• Changed message bar related to an add-on incompatible with the current app version into an error message bar (because the user cannot re-enable the add-ons marked as “app disabled” like in this case) – Bug 1856397

Developer Tools

DevTools

• Contributors
  • :sebo added a new CSS warning displayed when `text-wrap: balance` is ignored because the number of lines is greater than 10. (bug)
• Jamie (:jteh) fixed a bug with the Accessibility Panel in the Browser Toolbox which was unable to inspect popups (eg <input type=date>’s calendar).
• Hubert (:bomsy) fixed a bug in the Debugger where you would see “undefined” tooltips displayed on top of Debugger inline previews (bug).
• Alex (:ochameau) has landed several performance improvements for the Debugger. (bug, bug, bug)
• Nicolas (:nchevobbe) added a pretty print button in the Style Editor, so that you can force pretty printing in case it did not automatically happen. (bug)

The button can be found at the bottom of the Style Editor.

• Nicolas fixed a bug with the “Copy Location” context menu item of the ruleview, which was ignoring sourcemap information (bug)

Migration Improvements

• The patches to allow users on Ubuntu to import from Chromium when Firefox is installed as a Snap package have landed! This is still undergoing testing from QA, but if all goes well, this should ride out in Firefox 120.
• We’ve removed the ability to switch back to the old XUL-based migration dialog, in preparation for removing the old dialog altogether after the soft-freeze ends.
• For users migrating data between devices, we ran an experiment to see if adding adorable illustrations to the wizard on the switching-devices SUMO page would result in more people getting through the process. Interestingly, it seemed to have a small but significant effect! We’ve enabled the illustrations by default.

Inside this box is an adorable fox!

Performance Tools (aka Firefox Profiler)

• Display nicer time units in the timeline ruler for values that are better expressed in minutes or hours. (PR #4774)

• Show the hovered time at the top of the timeline

We now display a vertical line in the timeline when hovering over markers and the stack chart.

• • Check out this video to see how it works.
• Performance improvements
  • Improve call tree and flame graph performance for big profiles
  • Make removing a focus function faster
• Avoid showing the call tree panel when there’s no sample
• Custom tracks from markers
• We can now profile build jobs on Taskcluster!

Under the “Performance” tab, you can find a button to open Firefox Profiler.

After pressing the button, a new Firefox Profiler page will appear.

• You can get a profile of your local build by running `./mach resource-usage`

Privacy/Security

• pbz made it so that clearing a Private Browsing session will also cause the sidebar to close.

Search and Navigation

• Drew (:adw) finished integrating the Rust Suggest component into Desktop: 1851255, 1855884, 1857396, 1855884
• Drew removed support for individual help and dismiss buttons in a Urlbar result as the functionality is currently accessible from the urlbar results menu: 1827966
• Dale(:daleharvey) continued work on recent searches, which allows user to see a list of recent searches while the URL bar is in a zero prefix mode: 1852848, 1858639
• Marc Seibert(:mseibert) made it such that trimming the URLs in the URL bar only occurs if the directionality doesn’t change to RTL: 1836962
• Mandy(:mcheang) continued work on Search Service improvements, refactoring initialization and setting up the steps for SearchService to eventually migrate to a new search configuration: 1855084, 1852792
• Karandeep(:klubana) tweaked the UI of a clipboard suggestion to use a chiclet, different text, and icon: 1858141

Storybook/Reusable Components

• sclements fixed a bug where the panel-list sub-menu was getting cut off when the browser window isn’t wide enough (Bug 1855827)
• ganna landed a patch to use moz-message-bar in the unified extensions panel (Bug 1844850)
• ganna landed a fix for an issue where split buttons in chrome panels had a gap between the buttons (Bug 1854420)
• emilio fixed an issue where calling setAttribute(“selectedIndex”, 0) on the XUL deck element wasn’t working as expected (Bug 1856189)
• hjones landed a patch to make the space between the new toggle label and button clickable (Bug 1852827)
• mstriemer has been working on renaming all of the things from “XUL Widgets” to “UI Widgets”