The Firefox New Tab page is shown with the browser logo in the top-left, the weather indicator in the top-right, and 4 columns of stories rather than 3.
Categories: News

New Year New Tab – These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 175

Highlights

  • Firefox 134 went out earlier this month!
  • A refreshed New Tab layout is being rolled out to users in the US and Canada, featuring a repositioned logo and weather widget to prioritize Web Search, Shortcuts, and Recommended Stories at the top. The update includes changes to the card UI for recommended stories and allows users with larger screens to see up to four columns, making better use of space.
    • The Firefox New Tab page is shown with the browser logo in the top-left, the weather indicator in the top-right, and 4 columns of stories rather than 3.

      Making better use of the space on the New Tab page!

  • dao enabled the ability to search for closed and saved tab groups (Bug 1936831)
  • kcochrane landed a keyboard shortcut for expanding and collapsing the new sidebar
    • Collapse/Expand sidebar (Ctrl + Alt + Z) – for Linux/Win
    • Collapse/Expand sidebar (⌃Z) – for macOS

Friends of the Firefox team

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

Script to find new contributors from bug list

Volunteers that fixed more than one bug

  •  Karan Yadav

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

Addon Manager & about:addons
  • Fixed about:addons blocklist state message-bars not refreshed when the add-on active state doesn’t change along with the blocklist state (Bug 1936407)
  • Fixed a moz-toggle button related visual regression in about:addons (regression introduced from Bug 1917305 in Nightly 135 and fixed in the same release by Bug 1937627)
  • Adjusted popup notification primary button default string to match the Acorn style guide (Bug 1935726)
WebExtensions Framework
  • Fixed an add-on debugging toolbox regression on resending add-ons network requests from the DevTools Network panel (regression introduced in Nightly 134 from Bug 1754452 and fixed in Nightly 135 by Bug 1934478)
    • Thanks to Alexandre Poirot for fixing this add-on debugging regression
WebExtension APIs
  • Fixed notification API event listeners not restarting suspended extension event pages (Bug 1932263)
  • As part of the work for the MV3 userScripts API (currently locked behind a pref in Nightly 134 and 135):
    • Introduced permission warning in the Firefox Desktop about:addons extensions permissions view (Bug 1931545)
    • Introduced userScripts optional permissions request dialog on Firefox Desktop (Bug 1931548)
    • NOTE: An MV3 userScripts example extensions added to the MDN webextensions examples repo is being worked on in the following github pull request: https://github.com/mdn/webextensions-examples/pull/576
    • The permission warning in the Firefox Desktop about:addons extensions permissions view. It is showing a warning: "Unverified scripts can pose security and privacy risks, such as running harmful code or tracking website activity. Only run scripts from extensions or sources you trust."The WebExtension permission request dialog in the Firefox Desktop when installing or updating an extension is shown. It is showing a warning: "Unverified scripts can pose security and privacy risks. Only run scripts from extensions or sources you trust."

DevTools

DevTools Toolbox
WebDriver BiDi
  • External:
    • Liam (:ldebeasi) added support for the format argument to the browsingContext.captureScreenshot command. Clients can use it to specify an image format with a type such as “image/jpg” and a quality ranging between 0 and 1 (#1861737)
    • Spencer (:speneth) created a helper to check if a browsing context is a top-level browsing context (#1927829)
  • Internal:
    • Sasha landed several fixes to allow saving minidump files easily with geckodriver for both Firefox on desktop and mobile, which will allow to debug crashes more efficiently (#1882338, #1859377, #1937790)
    • Henrik enabled the remote.events.async.enabled preferences, which means we now process and dispatch action sequences in the parent process (#1922077)
    • Henrik fixed a bug with our AnimationFramePromise which could cause actions to hang if a navigation was triggered (#1937118)

Information Management

  • We’re delaying letting the new sidebar (sidebar.revamp pref) ride the trains while we address findings from user diary studies, experiments and other feedback. Stay tuned!
  • Reworked the vertical tabs mute button in Bug 1921060 – Implement the full mute button spec
  • We’re focusing on fixing papercuts for the new sidebar and vertical tabs.

Migration Improvements

  • We’ve concluded the experiment that encouraged users to create or sign-in to Mozilla accounts to sync from the AppMenu and FxA toolbar menu. We’re currently analyzing the results.
  • Before the end of 2024, we were able to get some patches into 135 that will let us try some icon variations for the signed-out state for the FxA toolbar menu button. We’ll hopefully be testing those when 135 goes out to release!

Performance Tools (aka Firefox Profiler)

  • We added a new way to filter the profile to only include the data that is related to the tab you would like to see, by adding tab selector. You can see this by clicking the “Full Profile” button on the top left corner. This allows web and gecko developers to only focus on a certain website.
    • A dropdown selector is shown above the tracks in the Firefox Profiler UI. The dropdown lists "All tabs and windows" and then "browser", followed by a list of individual domains. like "www.mozilla.org" and "www.google.com".
  • We implemented a new way to control the profiler using POSIX signals on macOS and Linux. You can send SIGUSR1 to the Firefox main process to start the profiler and SIGUSR2 to stop and dump the profile to disk. We hope that this feature will be useful for cases where Firefox is completely frozen and using the usual profiler buttons is not an option. See our documentation here.
  • Lots of performance work to make the profiler itself faster.

Search and Navigation

Scotch Bonnet

  • Mandy enhanced restricted search keywords so that users can use both their own localized language as well as the English shortcut Bug 1933003
  • Daisuke fixed an issue where pressing ctrl+shift+tab while the Unified Search Button was enabled and the address bar is focused would not go to the previous tab Bug 1931915
  • Daisuke also fixed an issue where focusing the urlbar with a click and pressing shift tab wouldn’t focus the Unified Search Button Bug 1933251
  • Daisuke enabled the keyboard focus of the Unified Search Button using Shift + Tab after focus using CTRL + L Bug 1937363
  • Daisuke changed the behavior of the Unified Search Button to show when editing a URL instead of initial focus Bug 1936090
  • Lots of other papercuts fixed by the team

Search

  • Mandy initiated the removal of old application provided search engine WebExtensions from a users profile as they no longer require them due to the usage of search-config-v2 Bug 1885953

Suggest

  • Drew implemented a new simplified UI treatment for Weather Suggestions Bug 1938517
  • Drew removed the Suggest JS Backend as the Rust based backend was enabled by default in 124 Bug 1932502

Storybook/Reusable Components

  • Anna Kulyk added new  –table-row-background-color and –table-row-background-color-alternate design tokens Bug 1919313
  • Anna Kulyk added support for the panel-item disabled attribute Bug 1919122

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