Categories: News

Search Improvements Are On Their Way – These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 169

Highlights

  • The search team is planning on enabling a series of improvements to the search experience this week in Nightly! This project is called “Scotch Bonnet”.
    • We would love to hear your feedback via bug reports! We will also create a Connect page shortly.
    • The pref is browser.urlbar.scotchBonnet.enableOverride for anyone who wants a sneak preview.
  • The New Tab team has added a new experimental widget which shows a vertical list of interesting stories across multiple cells of the story grid:
    • The new tab page in Firefox is shown. The grid of stories is shown below the default set of top sites, and includes a new "tall" widget that spans several grid cells. That tall widget lists several stories vertically.

      We’re testing out a vertical list of stories in regions where stories are enabled.

    • You can test this out in Nightly by setting browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.discoverystream.contextualContent.enabled to true in about:config
    • We will be running a small experiment with this new widget, slated for Firefox 132, for regions where stories are enabled.

Friends of the Firefox team

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

Volunteers that fixed more than one bug

  • Henry Wilkes (they/them) [:henry-x]
  • Meera Murthy

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

WebExtensions Framework
  • Fixed mild performance regression in load times when the user browses websites that are registered as default/built-in search engines (fixed in Nightly 132, and uplifted to Beta 131) – Bug 1916240
  • Fixed startup error hit by static themes using MV3 manifest.json files – Bug 1917613
  • The WebExtensions popup notification shown when an extension is hiding Firefox tabs (using the tabs.hide method) is now anchored to the extensions button – Bug 1920706
  • Fixed browser.search.get regression (initially introduced in ESR 128 through the migration to the search-config-v2) that made the faviconUrl be set to blob urls (not accessible to other extensions). This regression has been fixed in Nightly 132 and then uplifted to Firefox 131 and ESR 128
    • Thanks to Standard8 for fixing the regression!
WebExtension APIs
  • The storage.session API now logs a warning message to raise extension developer awareness that the storage.session quota is being exceeded on channels where it is not enforced yet (currently only enforced on nightly >= 131) – Bug 1916276

DevTools

DevTools Toolbox
WebDriver BiDi
  • External:
    • Liam DeBeasi renamed the isRoot argument of getBrowsingContextInfo() to includeParentId to make the code easier to understand (bug).
  • Updates:
    • Thanks to jmaher for splitting the marionette job in several chunks (bug).
    • Julian fixed the timings for network events to be in milliseconds instead of microseconds (bug)
    • Henrik and Julian improved the framework used by WebDriver BiDi to avoid failing commands when browsing contexts are loading (bug, bug, bug)
    • Sasha updated the WebDriver BiDi implementation for cookies to use the network.cookie.CHIPS.enabled preference. The related workarounds will be removed in the near future. (bug)

Lint, Docs and Workflow

Migration Improvements

New Tab Page

  • We’re going to be doing a slow, controlled rollout to change the endpoints with which we fetch sponsored top sites and stories. This is part of a larger architectural change to unify the mechanism with which we fetch this sponsored content.

Search and Navigation

  • Scotch Bonnet (search UI update) Related Changes
    • General
      • Daisuke connected Scotch Bonnet to Nimbus 1919813
    • Intuitive Search Keywords
      • Mandy added telemetry for search restrict keywords 1917992
    • Unified Search Button
      • Dale improved the UI of the Unified Search Button by aligning it closer to the design 1908922
      • Daisuke made the Unified Search Button more consistent depending on whether it was in an open/closed state 1913234
    • Persisted Search
      • James changed Persisted Search to use a cleaner design in preparation for its use with the Unified Search Button. It now has a button on the right side to revert the address bar and show the URL. And the Persist feature works with non-default app provided engines  1919193, 1915273, 1913312
    • HTTPS Trimming
      • Marco changed it so keyboard focus immediately untrims an https address 1898155

One comment on “Search Improvements Are On Their Way – These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 169”

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  1. Anon E Moose wrote on

    Maybe the search team should focus on fixing old interface issues with search. Adding new features doesn’t fix how terrible the DEDICATED search box is, removal of custom engines without addons, “Action” shorcuts that would be useful.

    But, just like the dumb@$$ AI bots, let’s add shiny new features and ignore the old issues completely. Then say it’s what the users wanted without a shred of evidence posted from surveys or all that personal data in GLEAN 🙄

    Reply

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