Celebrating 20 years of Firefox – These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 171

Highlights

• Firefox is turning 20 years old! Here’s a sneak peek of what’s to come for the browser.
• We completed work on the new messaging surface for the AppMenu / FxA avatar menu. There’s a new FXA_ACCOUNTS_APPMENU_PROTECT_BROWSING_DATA entry in about:asrouter for people who’d like to try it. Here’s another variation:

• The experiment will also test new copy for the state of the sign-in button when this message is dismissed:

• Alexandre Poirot added an option in the Debugger Sources panel to control the visibility of WebExtension content scripts (#1698068)

• Hubert Boma Manilla improved the Debugger by adding the paused line location in the “paused” section, and making it a live region so it’s announced to screen reader when pausing/stepping (#1843320)

Friends of the Firefox team

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

Script to find new contributors from bug list

Volunteers that fixed more than one bug

• abhijeetchawla[:ff2400t]

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

• Diego Ciudad Real added the reusable components group to the “Getting Reviews” documentation
• abhijeetchawla[:ff2400t] fixed UNSAFE_* react lifecycle methods in devtools/client/*
  • 1810429, 1810480, 1810482, 1810483, 1810485, 1810486
• abhijeetchawla[:ff2400t] also updated the console architecture diagram to use MermaidJS
• Collin Richards made pressing ESC on the address bar return focus to window

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

WebExtensions Framework

• In Firefox >= 133, WebExtensions sidebar panels can close themselves using window.close() (Bug 1921631)
  • Thanks to Becca King for contributing this enhancement to the WebExtensions sidebar panels 🎉

WebExtension APIs

• A new telemetry probe related to the storage.sync quota has been introduced in Firefox 133 (Bug 1915183). The new probe is meant to help plan replacement of the deprecated Kinto-based backend with a rust-based storage.sync implementation in Firefox for Android (similar to the one introduced in Firefox for desktop v79).

DevTools

DevTools Toolbox

• Abhijeet Chawla is refactoring our React codebase, switching away from deprecated lifecycle methods (#1810429, #1810480, #1810482, #1810483, #1810485, #1810486)
• Abhijeet Chawla also migrated a couple of our ASCII base diagram in our documentation to use MermaidJS instead (#1855165, #1855168)
• Hubert Boma Manilla made items in the Breakpoints panel accessible to keyboard users (#1870062)
• Hubert Boma Manilla enabled CodeMirror 6 on the Debugger on Nightly, which is the culmination of months of hard work! (#1904489)
• Nicolas Chevobbe continues his work on supporting High Contrast Mode in the toolbox (#1916391, #1917782, #1921427, #1926794, #1921428, #1926851, #1926852, #1926878)
• Nicolas Chevobbe  and Julian Descottes fixed an issue where console.log emitted in Service Workers weren’t displayed in the console (#1921384, #1923648)
• Nicolas Chevobbe fixed a serious performance issue on pages with thousands of CSS variables (#1922511)

Lint, Docs and Workflow

• The source documentation generate and upload tasks on CI will now output specific TEST-UNEXPECTED-FAILURE lines for new warnings/errors.
  • Running ./mach doc locally should generally do the same.
  • The previous “max n warnings” has been replaced by an allow list of current warnings/errors.
• Flat config and ESLint v9 support has now been added to eslint-plugin-mozilla.
  • This is a big step in preparing to switch mozilla-central over to the new flat configuration & then v9.
• hjones upgraded stylelint to the latest version and swapped its plugins to use ES modules.

New Tab Page

• The New Tab team is analyzing the results from an experiment that tried different layouts, to see how it impacted usage. Our Data Scientists are pouring over the data to help inform design directions moving forward.
• Another experiment is primed to run once Firefox 132 fully ships to release – the new “big rectangle” vertical widget will be tested to see whether or not users find this new affordance useful.
• Work completed on the Fakespot experiment that we’re going to be running for Firefox 133 in December. We’ll be using the vertical widget to display products identified as high-quality, with reliable reviews.

Search and Navigation

• 2024 Address Bar Scotch Bonnet Project
  • Various bugs were fixed by Mandy, Dale, and Yazan
    • quick actions search mode preview was formatted incorrectly (1923550)
    • dedicated Search button was getting stuck after clicking twice (1913193)
    • about chiclets not showing up when scotch bonnet is enabled (1925643)
    • tab to search not shown when scotch bonnet is enabled (1925129)
    • searchmode switcher works when Search Services fails (1906541)
    • localize strings for search mode switcher button (1924228)
    • secondary actions UX updated to be shown between heuristic and first search suggestion. (1922570)
  • To try out these scotch bonnet features, use the PREF browser.urlbar.scotchBonnet.enableOverride
• Address Bar
  • Moritz deduplicated bookmark and history results with the same URL, but different references. (1924968) browser.urlbar.deduplication.enabled
  • Daisuke fixed overlapping remote tab text in compact mode (1924911)
  • Richardscollin, a volunteer contributor, fixed pressing esc on the address bar when it was selected and will now return focus to the window. (1086524)
  • Daisuke fixed the “Not Secure” label being Illegible when the width is too small (1925332)
• Suggest
  • adw has been working on City-based weather suggestions (1921126, 1925734, 1925735, 1927010)
  • adw working on integrating machine learning (MLSuggest) with UrlbarPRoviderQuickSuggest (1926381)
• Search
  • Mortiz landed a patch to localize the keyword for wikipedia search engine. 1687153, 1925735
• Places
  • Yazan landed favicon improvement on how firefox picks the best favicon for page-icon urls without a path. (1664001)
  • Mak landed a patch where we significantly improved performance and memory usage when checking for visited URIs. The process by executing a single query for the entire batch of URIs, instead of running one query per URI. (1594368)