Learning and Improving Every Day – These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 173

Highlights

• Firefox 133 releases today! Lots of goodies in there, including Bounce Tracking Protection, GPU-accelerated canvas on Windows and more!
• Nicolas Chevobbe Enabled High Contrast Theme support (devtools.high-contrast-mode-support) on Nightly (#1932642)
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• Some recent changes in the platform have resulted in really nice wins on the Speedometer 3 benchmark! Keep up the good work, gang!
• The Search team continues to innovate and improve on the default search experience in the AwesomeBar. Learn more here, and give feedback if you have any!
• A small portion of our release population might get enrolled in an experiment to try our new sidebar and vertical tabs experiment. If you get enrolled, this is the Connect page to let us know what you think!

Friends of the Firefox team

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

Volunteers that fixed more than one bug

• Abhijeet Chawla[:ff2400t]

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

• AAR rounded the font properties in the inspector
• 🌟 defaude styled “deleted” rows to be more recognizable in about:config
• Abhijeet Chawla[:ff2400t] removed UNSAFE_componentWillReceiveProps in devtools/client/responsive/components/ViewportDimension.js and removed UNSAFE_componentWillReceiveProps in devtools/client/responsive/components/UserAgentInput.js and removed UNSAFE_componentWillMount in devtools/client/accessibility/components/AuditController.js
• Haoran Tang added telemetry to about:translations
• 🌟 Neri Marschik added setting to control position of tabs opened from pinned tabs
• 🌟 Sergei Smagin made Reader Mode respect Firefox font settings
• 🌟 Spencer made moz-message-bar fluent properties set to true by default

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

WebExtension APIs

• Initial implementation of the MV3 userScripts API has landed behind a pref in Nightly 134 (Bug 1911833, Bug 1911834, Bug 1911835, Bug 1911836, Bug 1917000)
• Fixed missing port.onDisconnect API event on port disconnected before the port.onConnect API event was dispatched – Bug 1931902

WebExtensions Framework

• • Fixed a tabs events regression on extensions-created tabs with a tab url that uses an unknown protocol (e.g. extension-registered protocol handler) – Bug 1921426

• Thanks to John Bieling for reporting and fixing this regression

Addon Manager & about:addons

• In the extensions panel, a new messagebar has been introduced to let users know when an extension has been disabled through the blocklist (for add-ons of type extensions disabled by either a hard or soft block) – Bug 1917848

DevTools

DevTools Toolbox

• Abhijeet Chawla is continuing their quest to move away from deprecated React lifecycle methods in our codebase (#1810438, #1810439, #1810481)
• AAR made sure values in Font editor are rounded (#1465026)
• Alexandre Poirot fixed an issue where “Pause on caught exception” setting wasn’t applied on DevTools startup (#1930687)
• Hubert Boma Manilla made the Netmonitor show when a request has 103 Early Hints Information (#1811455)
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• Workweek in Paris to plan 2025

Fluent

• Over 67% of Firefox’s strings are now Fluent!

Lint, Docs and Workflow

• The test-manifest-toml linter has now been added to CI. This may show up in code reviews, and typically reports issues like not using double quotes, separating skip-if conditions to multiple lines, ordering of tests in a file.

Migration Improvements

• We have an upcoming experiment where we’re going to be trying some new variants to the signed-out state of the accounts toolbar button to make it clearer that signing in is a thing that you can do.
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• Thanks to Emily McMinn who is working on improving the accessibility of the migration wizard in high-contrast mode!

Picture-in-Picture

• Thanks to florian for removing an unused call to Services.telemetry.keyedScalarAdd (bug 1932090), as a part of the effort to remove legacy telemetry scalar APIs (bug 1931901)
• Also thanks to emilio for updating the PiP window to use outerHeight and outerWidth (bug 1931747), providing better compatibility for rounded PiP window corners and shadows on Windows

Search and Navigation

• Address bar revamp (aka Scotch Bonnet project)
  • Dale disabled “interventions” results in address bar when new Quick Actions are enabled Bug 1794092
  • Dale re-enabled the Contextual Search feature Bug 1930547
  • Yazan changed Search Mode to not stick unless search terms are persisted, to avoid accidentally searching for URLs Bug 1923686
  • Daisuke fixed a problem where confirming an autofilled search keyword did not enable Search Mode Bug 1925532 
  • Daisuke made the Unified Search Button panel pick theme colors Bug 1930190
  • Daisuke improved keyboard navigation in and out of the Unified Search Button Bug 1930492, Bug 1931765
  • Emilio fixed regressions in the Address Bar alignment when the browser is full-screen Bug 1930499, and when the window is not focused Bug 1932652 
• Search Service
  • Moritz improved how the Search Service manages engines icons Bug 1655070, Bug 1655076, Bug 1930488
  • Mark is working on a new cross-platform SearchEngineSelector component (picking engines list depending on user locale and region) in Rust Bug 1919540, Bug 1923689
• Suggest
  • Drew improved Yelp and weather results Bug 1930640, Bug 1930646, Bug 1931220, Bug 1931221