The "Manage Extension Shortcuts" pane from about:addons. A series of keyboard shortcut mappings for an extension is displayed - one of which is mapped to the F19 key.
Categories: News

Key Improvements – These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 174

Highlights

  • Nicolas Chevobbe [:nchevobbe] Added $$$ , a console helper that retrieve elements from the document, including those in the ShadowDOM (#1899558)
  • Thanks to John Diamond for contributing changes to allow users to assign custom keyboard shortcuts for WebExtensions using the F13-F19 extended function keys
    • You can access this menu from the cog button in about:addons
    • The "Manage Extension Shortcuts" pane from about:addons. A series of keyboard shortcut mappings for an extension is displayed - one of which is mapped to the F19 key.

      You can find this menu in about:addons by clicking the cog icon and choosing “Manage Extension Shortcuts”

    • NOTE: F13-F19 function keys are still going to be invalid if specified in the default shortcuts set in the extension manifest
  • We’re going to launch the “Sections” feed experiment in New Tab soon. This layout changes how stories are laid out (new modular layouts instead of the same medium cards, some sections organized into categories)
    • Try it out yourself in Nightly by setting the following to TRUE
      • browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.discoverystream.sections.enabled
      • browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.discoverystream.sections.cards.enabled
  • Dale implemented searching Tab Groups by name in the Address Bar and showing them as Actions – Bug 1935195

Friends of the Firefox team

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

Volunteers that fixed more than one bug

  • Abhijeet Chawla[:ff2400t]
  • Meera Murthy

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

Addon Manager & about:addons
  • Thanks to Matt Mower for contributing CSS cleanup and modernization changes to the “Manage Extensions Shortcuts” section of about:addons – Bug 1921634
WebExtensions Framework
  • A warning message bar will be shown in the Extensions panel under the soft-blocked extensions that have been re-enabled by the user – Bug 1925291
WebExtension APIs
  • Native messaging support for snap-packaged Firefox has been now merged into mozilla-central – Bug 1661935
    • NOTE: Bug 1936114 is tracking fixing an AttributeError being hit by mach xpcshell-test as a side-effect of changes applied by Bug 1661935, until the fix is landed mach test is a short-term workaround to run xpcshell tests locally

DevTools

DevTools Toolbox
WebDriver BiDi
  • External:
    • Dan (temidayoazeez032) implemented the browser.getClientWindows command which allows clients to retrieve a list of information about the current browser windows. (#1855025)
    • Spencer (speneth1) removed a duplicated get windows helper which used to be implemented in two different classes. (#1925985)
    • Patrick (peshannon104) added a log to help investigate network events for which WebDriver BiDi didn’t manage to retrieve all the response information. (#1930848)
  • Updates:
    • Sasha improved support for installing extensions with Marionette and geckodriver. Geckodriver was updated to push the addon file to the device using base 64, which allowed to enable installing extensions on GeckoView. (#1806135)
    • Still on the topic of add-ons, Sasha also added a flag to install add-ons allowed to run in Private Browsing mode. (#1926311)
    • Julian added two new fields in BiDi network events: initiatorType and destination, coming from the fetch specification. The previous initiator.type field had no clear definition and is now deprecated. This supports the transition of Cypress from CDP to WebDriver BiDi. (#1904892)
    • Julian also fixed a small issue with those two new fields, which had unexpected values for top-level document loads. (#1933331)
    • After discussions during TPAC, we decided to stop emitting various events for the initial about:blank load. Sasha fixed a first gap on this topic: WebDriver BiDi will no longer emit browsingContext.navigationStarted events for such loads. (#1922014)
    • Henrik improved the stability of commands in Marionette in case the browsing context gets discarded (#1930530).
    • Henrik also did similar improvements for our WebDriver BiDi implementation, and fine-tuned our logic to retry commands sent to content processes (#1927073).
    • Julian reverted the message for UnexpectedAlertOpenError in Marionette to make sure we include the dialog’s text, as some clients seemed to rely on this behavior. (#1924469)
    • Thanks to :valentin who fixed an issue with nsITimedChannel.asyncOpenTime, which sometimes was set to 0 unexpectedly (#1931514). Prior to that, Julian added a small workaround to fallback on nsITimedChannel.channelCreationTime, but we will soon revert it (#1930849).
    • Sasha updated the browsingContext.traverseHistory command to only accept top-level browsing contexts. (#1924859)

Lint, Docs and Workflow

New Tab Page

  • FakeSpot recommended gifts experiment ended last week
  • For this next release the team is working on:
    • Supporting experiments with more industry standard ad sizes (Leaderboard and billboard)
    • Iterating/continuing Sections feed experiment
    • AdsFeed tech debt (Consolidating new tab ads logic into one place)

Password Manager

Places

  • Marco removed the old bookmarks transaction manager (undo/redo) code, as a better version of it shipped for a few months – Bug 1870794
  • Marco has enabled for release in Firefox 135 a safeguard preventing origins from overwhelming history with multiple consecutive visits, the feature has been baking in Nightly for the last few months – Bug 1915404
  • Yazan fixed a regression with certain svg favicons being wrongly picked, and thus having a bad contrast in the UI (note it may take a few days for some icons to be expired and replaced on load) – Bug 1933158 

Search and Navigation

  • Address bar revamp (aka Scotch Bonnet project)
    • Moritz fixed a bug causing address bar results flicker due to switch to tab results – Bug 1901161
    • Yazan fixed a bug with Actions search mode wrongly persisting after picking certain actions – Bug 1919549
    • Dale added badged entries to the unified search button to install new OpenSearch engines – Bug 1916074
    • Dale fixed a problem with some installed OpenSearch engines not persisting after restart – Bug 1927951
    • Daisuke implemented dynamic hiding of the unified search button (a few additional changes incoming to avoid shifting the URL on focus) – Bug 1928132
    • Daisuke fixed a problem with Esc not closing the address bar dropdown when unified search button is focused – Bug 1933459
  • Suggest
  • Other relevant fixes
    • Contributor Anthony Mclamb fixed unexpected console error messages when typing just ‘@’ in the address bar – Bug 1922535

Storybook/Reusable Components

  • Anna Kulyk (welcome! Yes of moz-message-bar fame!) cleaned up some leftover code in moz-card Bug 1910631
  • Mark Kennedy updated the Heartbeat infobar to use the moz-five-star component, and updated the component to support selecting a rating Bug 1864719
  • Mark Kennedy updated the about:debugging page to use the new –page-main-content-width design token which had the added benefit of bringing our design tokens into the chrome://devtools/ package Bug 1931919
  • Tim added support for support links in moz-fieldset Bug 1917070 Storybook
  • Hanna updated our support links to be placed after the description, if one is present Bug 1928501 Storybook

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