Turn Tabs To Their Side – These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 177

Highlights

• Firefox 135 goes to release today (Feb 4th)! Lots of great changes in this release!
• We’ve landed Bug 1936379 – Add Sidebar and Vertical Tabs checkboxes in about:preferences and remove from Nightly Labs and the new sidebar and vertical tabs are riding the trains as options in the preferences UI (was in Labs)
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• The Manifest V3 userScripts API has been enabled by default on Desktop builds and riding the Firefox 136 release train
  • Documentation is forthcoming. In the meantime, this is a pull-request that shows an example of how the userScripts API can be used.
• A new browser.commands.openShortcutsSettings WebExtension API method allows extensions to direct users to the keyboard shortcuts management UI (in about:addons). Thanks to Matt Mower for this contribution!
• Alexandre Poirot [:ochameau] Added some crash UI to make it easy for users to report an issue on Bugzilla (#1941886)
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Friends of the Firefox team

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

• Christoph Moench-Tegeder extended BSD about:processes for FreeBSD
• 🌟 Meike [:mei] added pt to size unit options in FontSize component
• Matt Mower added openShortcutSettings() to browser.commands extension API

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

Addon Manager & about:addons

• • Fixed a regression related to using the mouse to select text inside an extension options page embedded in about:addons – Bug 1939206
  • Fixed a leak triggered by the private browsing checkbox included in the install dialog (caught by shutdown leaks failure hit by one of our tests) – Bug 1943031
  • Starting from Firefox 136, users will be able to undo the installation of a new theme directly from the notification popup – Bug 1931402

• Thanks to Becca King for contributing this enhancement 🎉

WebExtensions Framework

• A new background.preferred_environment manifest property has been introduced in Firefox 136 in order to let cross-browser Manifest V3 extensions use a background service worker on Chrome and a background event page on Firefox with the same manifest file – Bug 1930334

DevTools

• Meike added the pt unit in the Fonts tab (#1940009)
• Julien Wajsberg added link to MDN for Cross-Origin-* headers in Netmonitor (#1943610)
• Tooru Fujisawa [:arai] fixed an issue where subsequent cached requests for scripts weren’t displayed in Netmonitor (#1945492)
• Alexandre Poirot [:ochameau] fixed a performance regression that was making console evaluation slower than it should have been (#1933343)
• Alexandre Poirot [:ochameau] made JavaScript errors and warnings logged through MOZ_LOG (#1925003)
• Julian Descottes [:jdescottes] improved Netmonitor performance, specially when it contains a lot of requests (#1942149), but also when displaying large big data URIs (#1943284)
• Nicolas Chevobbe [:nchevobbe] made the Netmonitor “Raw” Response checkbox to persist (#1555647)
• Hubert Boma Manilla (:bomsy) fixed a hang when opening WASM files in the Debugger (#1935157), and thanks to that was able to enable codemirror 6 on release (#1942702)

WebDriver BiDi

• Liam DeBeasi improved the browsingContext.contextDestroyed event to serialize the whole browsing context tree in the event’s payload.
• Krzysztof Jan Modras (:chrmod) moved Marionette’s Addon module to a shared module for the Remote Agent.
• Henrik updated crash reports from Marionette and Remote Agent to be annotated accordingly.
• Henrik also updated our vendored puppeteer version to v24.0.0 (note that it’s the first version of puppeteer to remove support for Firefox over CDP)
• Sasha updated session.subscribe command to return subscription ID which can be used now in session.unsubscribe to remove the subscription. This will give clients more flexibility to add and remove event listeners during tests.
• Henrik updated Marionette and WebDriver BiDi to avoid a HTTPS-First upgrade when performing a navigation.
• Sasha improved the “script.addPreloadScript” command to support “userContexts” argument to allow clients setting preload scripts to a list of user contexts (also known as Firefox containers).
• Henrik added the `–allow-nonlocal-connections` argument to the Marionette mach command to allow accessing remote locations.

Lint, Docs and Workflow

• Arai has removed the old support code for JSMs. This includes the ESLint support for the various import functions.
• Alex has merged the python linter requirements files, which should speed up linter setup a little bit.
• Ahal has stopped the “problem with lint setup, skipping android-api-lint, android-checkstyle, android-findbugs, android-lint, android-test” messages on Desktop builds.
• jdescottes improved some of our custom rules so that they do not throw when there’s missing arguments. This makes the in-editor experience better.

Information Management

• Various fixes to sidebar/toolbar interactions, some uplifts still to do.
• Changes to the sidebar settings: Bug 1939917 – Update Sidebar visibility settings and settings order

New Tab Page

• mconley moved the vast majority of the New Tab code from browser/components/newtab to browser/extensions/newtab
• Punam has moved and decoupled a bunch of modules out from the New Tab codebase into shared module directories in browser and toolkit, since other components depend on them
• We’re in the midst of a refresh of the stylings for top sites! This isn’t ready to ship yet, but it can still be previewed by setting browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.newtabShortcuts.refresh to true in Nightly.

Performance

• Some of the New Tab refactoring and movements have resulted in some memory-wins on our AWSY (“are we slim yet”) memory test as well as startup paint times

Performance Tools (aka Firefox Profiler)

• Profiles now contain markers for all Firefox data collection (both legacy telemetry and Glean)
  • Example profile
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Search and Navigation

Address bar Scotch Bonnet Project

• Improved feature callout for the Unified Search Button, enabled Scotch Bonnet by default in Beta, and re-enabled scotch bonnet in performance tests. (Bug 1937666, Bug 1942357, Bug 1923381)
• Removed redundant default search engine favicon in the Unified Search Button. (Bug 1908929)

Suggest

• AMP & Dismissal Fixes: Hooked up AMP-suggestion-matching strategy and fixed dismissals for Merino suggestions when Suggest features are disabled. (Bug 1942222, Bug 1942435)

Address bar

• Set deduplication threshold to zero, fixed Ctrl-Alt-b / Ctrl-Alt-f on Mac to properly move the cursor. (Bug 1943946,  Bug 1481157)
• Added support for exponents for calculator and updated UrlbarUtils icon protocol list. (Bug 1942623, Bug 1943272)

Search 

• Search improvements with Nimbus: Refactored the Search Nimbus set-up to split Search experiments between two nimbus feature sections – one for search feature related experiments, the other one for search configuration related experiments. (Bug 1830056, Bug 1883685, Bug 1942099, Bug 1942658)

Places

• Added support for exporting interactions via CSV and resolved process crash caused by missing chrome/resource URLs. (Bug 1940782, Bug 1945152)