Firefox Nightly News

Let's improve quality, build after build!
Categories: News

Better Searching in Firefox to close out 2023 – These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 151

No responses yet

Highlights

  • sclements reports that the Information Management team is planning to roll out search and virtual lists in Firefox View for Firefox 123 (all features are in-tree but we’ll be enabling it all by default and landing a few additional fixes/enhancements in Nightly).
    • For the impatient, or if you want to help test, you can enable this by setting browser.firefox-view.search.enabled and browser.firefox-view.virtual-list.enabled to true

    • The Firefox View tab is shown on the "Open tabs" pane. A search input is listed at the top of the page, with "mozilla" entered into it. Below, a list of tabs in the current window with the term "mozilla" in them are listed.

      We think this should make it easier for some users to find where they’ve been.

  • Dale has enabled Search Engine Rich Results in Firefox 122
    • Firefox will now show you visually rich suggestions when the search engine provides additional data.

    • The Firefox URL bar is shown. The text "what the fox say" is in the URL bar, and there are several autocomplete results. One of those autocomplete results is "what the fox say - Search with Google" with a thumbnail for a music video by "Brano di Ylvis".

      The Fox Says: Better Searching!

  • Drew has enabled MDN Suggest results in Firefox 122
    • Firefox will suggest interesting articles from MDN

    • The Firefox URL bar is shown. The term "Array" has been typed in the URL bar, and in the result panel, a "Recommended resource" is shown with a result from MDN. The listing includes an icon for MDN, and a blurb from the MDN page on JavaScript Arrays. There is a button labelled "Feedback" after the result.

      Available for users with Firefox 122 in the USA with Firefox Suggest enabled.

Friends of the Firefox team

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

Script to find new contributors from bug list

Volunteers that fixed more than one bug

  • AAR.dev
  • Jonas Jenwald [:Snuffleupagus]

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

WebExtensions Framework
  • Investigated and fixed too high Disk IO hit when the event page idle timer was reset on WebExtensions API calls, due to a glean metric being recorded on idle timer resets (Fix uplifted to Firefox 121 where the regression was originally introduced) – Bug 1868960
  • We’re working on the new taskcluster jobs to run tp6 and tp6m perftests on Firefox Desktop and Firefox for Android instances with real WebExtensions installed. A big shout-out to sparky for his amazing support! The new jobs have been landed as tier-3 (Bug 1859549) while we work on a few more related follow-ups:
    • A new linter is being created to explicitly validate changes to the “addons” properties set on condprof customization files (Bug 1868144)
    • Promoting the new tp6/tp6m webextensions jobs to tier-2 is tracked by Bug 1867781
    • Deprecating the talos real world extensions test is tracked by Bug 1869513 (blocked on promoting the new jobs to tier-2 and having confirmed the new perftests will generate the expected alerts and fully replace the old talos test)

Developer Tools

DevTools
  • Nazim and Alex collaborated to land a first minimal implementation of JS Tracer export to the Gecko Profiler (bug)
    • In console, start tracing with :trace –logMethod profiler
    • example of trace recorded on MDN, shown in profiler UI: https://share.firefox.dev/3GCLN6U
    • NOTE: timings are not accurate, this is still a WIP, but feedback is welcome
    • (tracer is still behind devtools.debugger.features.javascript-tracing)
  • Julien (from profiler team) made the profiler tab to open just after the currently selected tab (bug)
  • Emilio fixed an issue where text of stylesheet could not be fetched (bug)
  • Nicolas added link capability to popovertarget attribute in the markup view (bug)
  • Nicolas added beforetoggle and toggle event in the event listener breakpoints panel in the Debugger (bug)
  • Alex fixed $ and $$ helpers so they can be instantly evaluated (bug)
    • The Firefox DevTools Console is shown with the term `$$("*")` written in it. Below that, an instant evaluation is shown with an array of DOM items from the page.
  • Nicolas fixed a few accessibility issues in the toolbox
    • Add label to Objects toggle/arrow buttons (bug)
    • Make Inspector Rules view expandable containers (Pseudo elements, keyframes, …) keyboard accessible (bug)
    • Add proper aria attributes to Rules view top toolbar toggle buttons (:hov, .cls, print and dark/light mode simulation) (bug)
    • Add proper label to the “Add new CSS property” control (bug)
WebDriver BiDi
  • A collaboration with the pdf.js team was done to run pdf.js puppeteer integration tests with WebDriver BiDI (meta bug)
  • Sasha improved support for multi-click detection (double click, triple click and so on) when performing actions with Marionette and with WebDriverBiDi (bug)
  • This allowed Sasha to fix another issue where a double click was reported when the mouse cursor was moved (bug)
  • Henrik fixed a regression with Selenium atoms, making the “Get Visible Text” atom usable for elements located within a closed Shadow DOM again (bug).
  • Julian and Sasha implemented the “network.authRequired” event which is emitted when a network request requires authentication and prompts for credentials (bug)
  • Sasha fixed serialization of WindowProxy for out-of-process iframes (bug)

ESMification status

  • ESMified status:
    • browser: 89%
    • toolkit: 99%
    • Total:  96.48% (up from 96.41%)
  • #esmification on Matrix

Lint, Docs and Workflow

Migration Improvements

  • From other browsers:
    • mconley has a fix up to make importing history from Safari more reliable when Safari stores invalid URLs
  • To other devices:

New Tab Page

Search and Navigation

  • Dao is working on a contextual result to inform users about additional Firefox Suggest functionality when opting in to our responsible data collection.
    • Will be part of an experiment in Firefox 121
    • An item is shown in the Firefox URL bar dropdown. It has the following text: "Find the best of the web, faster We're building a better search experience. When you allow Mozilla to process your search queries, we can create more relevant suggestions from Nightly and our partners. Privacy-first, always. Learn more" Followed by two buttons: "Allow suggestions" and "Not now"
  • Notable bug fixes
  • Work continues on search configuration improvements, telemetry, offline Firefox Suggest, hybrid search, https trimming and other activities.

Storybook/Reusable Components

  • tgiles landed the new moz-card widget
    • You can see this new card in action via ./mach storybook and then navigating to UI Widgets/Card in Storybook

No comments yet

Post a comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *