Streamline your screen time with auto-open Picture-in-Picture and more – These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 166

Highlights

• Special shout-out to Daniele (egglessness) who landed a new experimental Picture-in-Picture feature that can be enabled in Firefox 130! This feature automatically triggers Picture-in-Picture mode for any playing video when the associated tab is backgrounded. This can be enabled in about:settings#experimental
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  • Got feedback? You can leave it here on Connect!
• Olli Pettay fixed very long cycle collection times in workers which improved performance when Debugging large files in the DevTools Debugger (#1907794)
• You can now hover over elements in the shadow DOM, allowing you to capture more snippets of a page for screenshots. Thanks to Niklas for this Screenshots improvement and making it work with openOrClosedShadowRoot.

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    Want to highlight sample code from your favorite dev site? Now it’s possible with the latest Nightly version.

• Mandy has added support for showing search restriction keywords when users type @ in the address bar. If you want to check it out, be sure to set browser.urlbar.searchRestrictKeywords.featureGate to true.
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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

• Louis Mascari
• Mathew Hodson

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

• 🌟 cauasene00 disabled system add-on updates and removed the update url
• 🌟 Daniele Ferla added auto-toggle on tab switch for Picture-in-Picture
• 🌟 Liam DeBeasi updated Sidebar checkbox and radio to use Acorn styling
• Louis Mascari updated about:studies to report inactive rollouts under “Completed Studies” and fixed intermittent failures in browser_about_studies.js
• Dan added a base RootBiDiModule class
• Tim Williams fixed an issue with the favicon not resetting when changing tab to about:newtab with a blank new tab page configured

General triage

• hjones, emcminn, cmkm, and jteow are this month’s Firefox / Toolkit :: General triagers!

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

Addon Manager & about:addons

• Fixed origin control messages for MV3 extensions requesting access to all urls through two separate host permissions (e.g. “http://*/*” and “https://*/*”, instead of a single “<all_urls>” host permission) – Bug 1856383

WebExtension APIs

• Fixed webRequest.getSecurityInfo to make sure the options parameter is optional – Bug 1909474

DevTools

DevTools Toolbox

• Artem Manushenkov added viewport dimensions overlay when resizing window (#1826409)
• Alexandre Poirot Display tracer argument values as inline previews when opening frames from the console (#1871500)
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• Alexandre Poirot enabled the JS Tracer for remote debugging (#1866818) and in the Browser Toolbox (#1909544)
• Alex Thayer implemented a native backend for the JS tracer (#1906719)
• Alexandre Poirot and Julian Descottes fixed issues with local script override which should now work for SW (#1876060), CORS (#1834799) and CSP (#1904870) requests
• Hubert Boma Manilla is finalizing the Debugger migration to CodeMirror 6, now focusing on making tests to pass (#1909594, #1905840)
• Alexandre Poirot fixed an issue where source text content of ESM worker loaded via ChromeUtils methods was not showing in the Debugger (#1907977)
• Nicolas Chevobbe made flex and grid highlighters faster (#1909170)
• Nicolas Chevobbe made the “unused” parameter in light-dark() function struck through (#1857006)
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WebDriver BiDi

• External:
  • Thanks to Cauã Sene (cauasene00) for updating our tests to fully avoid requests related to system add-on updates. Previously they would just be redirected to a dummy URL and as a result were polluting our test logs. (#1904310)
• Updates:
  • Sasha implemented a new event called browsingContext.navigationFailed, which is raised whenever a navigation fails (e.g. canceled, network error, etc.). In combination with other events such as browsingContext.load, this allows clients to monitor navigations from start to finish in all scenarios (#1846601)
  • Sasha fixed a bug in the browsingContext.navigate command. If the client used the parameter wait=none, we now resolve the command even if the navigation triggered a “beforeunload” prompt. (#1763134)
  • Sasha fixed a bug with the network.authRequired event, which was previously duplicated after each manual authentication attempt, leading to too many events. (#1899711)
  • Julian updated the data-channel-opened notification to also be emitted for data URL channels created in content processes. Thanks to this WebDriver BiDi will now raise network events for all data URL requests. (#1904343)
  • Julian updated the logic for the network.responseCompleted and network.fetchError events in order to raise them at the right time, and ensure a correct ordering of events. For instance, per spec for a successful navigation network.responseCompleted should be raised before browsingContext.load. (#1882803)

Migration Improvements

• We’re working with UX and PM on a wizard that will walk users through getting backup enabled and configured just how they like it. We’re still in the midst of breaking that down, but the metabug is here.
• mconley landed patches to make Web Locks available to privileged code in the parent process, and to use them in the Backup Service to avoid the interleaving of creating / deleting backups
• sthompson improved our error handling in the backup management UI in about:settings
• fchasen has a patch up that, after recovery, will make the recovered profile the default, and shutdown the browser that initiated recovery
• kpatenio landed the password rules tooltip to the backup management UI, and is working on efficiently checking user passwords against a local copy of the same “common password” list that FxA uses.

Picture-in-Picture

• Some strings were updated to use capitalised “Picture-in-Picture” rather than “picture-in-picture” per our word list (bug)

Screenshots

• Niklas made the screenshots preview face keyboard accessible
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• Niklas fixed an issue where the RDM toolbar would overlap the dialog box

Search and Navigation

• Search
  • Mortiz has created a new test function, SearchTestUtils.setRemoteSettingsConfig for setting the search configuration in xpcshell-tests, and improved SearchTestUtils.updateRemoteSettingsConfig.
    • Both will take a partial search configuration & expand it into a full configuration. This simplifies test-setup, so that you only need to specify the bits that are important to the test.
    • Some tests are already using these, we’ll be rolling it out to more soon.
• Address Bar
  • Work on the dedicated search button continues, with improved keyboard navigation (Dale), better icons in dark mode (daisuke)
  • Karandeep and James have made the persistent search term feature more flexible to make it easier to handle more situations in future.

Storybook/Reusable Components

• Thanks to Liam (ldebeasi) for updating the moz-checkbox and moz-radio elements to always use the Acorn styling.
• When using the accordion moz-card, it can now be expanded and show its content by default.