Putting up Wallpaper – These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 178

Putting up Wallpaper – These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 178

Highlights

• Custom Wallpapers for New Tab are undergoing further refinement and bugfixing! Amy just fixed an issue which would cause the custom wallpaper image to flash under certain circumstances.
  • This can be tested in Nightly by visiting Firefox Labs in about:preferences and making sure “Choose a custom wallpaper or colour for New Tab” is checked.
• Profile Management
  • We are on track to ship our initial feature set to Beta and 0.5% of Release in Firefox 138!
  • We’ve been enabled in Nightly for a while, but to try this out in 138 Beta/Release, flip the browser.profiles.enabled pref to true
• Nicolas Chevobbe fixed an 11 year old bug by improving the performance of StyleEditor autocomplete for a specific case that would end up freezing/crashing Firefox!

Friends of the Firefox team

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

Script to find new contributors from bug list

Volunteers that fixed more than one bug

• Carlos
• Chris Shiohama
• cob.bzmoz
• Harold Camacho
• Shane Ziegler

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

• 🌟 James Stuckey Weber fixed an issue to show offset parent of fixed position elements if not root
• Mika Valkealahti removed nightly-only ifdef so vertical tabs controls in settings ride the train with 137
• Spencer added isNonEmptyArray assertion method to Assert.sys.mjs for WebDriverBiDi
• Dongwoo Kang added valid JSDoc for AboutNewTabService
• 🌟 Chris Shiohama added focusUrlBar property to new tabs created with right click context menu and removed `await` to BrowserTestUtils.addTab function calls in the Tabbed Browser component
• gautampanakkal added missing await keywords to popPrefEnv calls
• Harold Camacho added a heading to moz-page-nav in about:policies and added a PiP override for kick.com
• Abdelaziz Mokhnache added a column displaying the full path of the request url in Network Monitor
• Shane Ziegler moved new tab, new window, home button drag/drop handlers out of browser.js into ToolbarDropHandler.sys.mjs and moved three home button confirmation prompts to Fluent toolbarDropHandler.ftl and out of browser.properties
• Spencer set browser.dom.window.dump.enabled=false instances in core code to true for Remote Protocols

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

Addon Manager & about:addons

• All system add-ons are now built-in add-ons packaged in the omni jar 🎉
  • webcompat has been migrated into the Desktop omni jar as part of Bug 1948914 (in Nightly 138, like the other system add-ons migrated earlier in the same cycle).
• As part of handling the incident related to a second old intermediate certificate expired on March 14, we have landed the following changes in mozilla-central (and uplifted both to Beta 137, ESR 128 and ESR 115): Bug 1954818 – Add-ons signed before February 2018 are disabled and Bug 1954934 – Verify add-on signatures sooner when relevant after a browser update

WebExtensions Framework

• Thanks to Florian, the last remaining WebExtensions telemetry recorded as legacy telemetry scalars and histograms have been migrated to Glean (and mirrored to legacy telemetry through GIFFT) – Bug 1953106
• Fixed manifest validation error on manifests using an empty background.scripts property – Bug 1954637

DevTools

• Abdelaziz Mokhnache added a column in Network Monitor to display the full path of the request url (#1932626)
• David J. Cobb fixed the “Copy Object” context menu on custom formatted objects (#1947667)
• David J. Cobb also made private properties visible on logged custom elements (#1956149)
• Holger Benl fixed a case where breakpoint would not be visible in the gutter of a pretty-printed file (#1954109)
• Holger Benl fixed an issue that would cause the Debugger preview popup show erroneous data (#1954182)
• Alexandre Poirot prevented DevTools toolbox to crash when an error is thrown when iterating through Services.ww.getWindowEnumerator() (#1954474)
• Nicolas Chevobbe fixed a serialization issue that was leading to worker thread being paused without possibility to resume it (#1956197)
• Hubert Boma Manilla migrated parserWorker.getClosestFunctionName to use lezer (#1943945). The Debugger is now only using Babel when the “Show original variables” option is set. This is something we hope to get rid of thanks to new addition to the source map standard 
• Nicolas Chevobbe fixed an issue in the Rules view where adding a declaration in a rule with nested rule would bork the stylesheet (and the Rules view itself) (#1954704)

WebDriver BiDi

• Liam updated the “browsingContext.Info” type to as well include the “clientWindow” property, allowing clients to identify which browser window a given browsing context belongs to.
• Spencer enabled the “browser.dom.window.dump.enabled” preference for all remote protocols, ensuring that Firefox Beta and Release builds also route logs to stdout.
• Henrik added a new “–remote-enable-system-access” argument to Firefox to control whether connected clients can access the parent process. Marionette now uses this flag to determine if switching to the “chrome” context is permitted.
• Julian added support for writing vendor specific (moz:) modules, implemented only by Firefox outside the specification process. For instance, the profiler team plans to work on a moz:profiler module to record performance profiles.
• Julian fixed a bug in our “network.responseCompleted” event, which would always have a response.content.size set to 0.

Fluent

• At this point, over 68% of our strings are Fluent!
• Thanks to Shane Ziegler for converting some of our .properties strings to Fluent!
• Thanks to flod for going on a tear and getting rid of a bunch of unused Fluent strings (example, example)
• Congratulations to eemeli – the Unicode MessageFormat 2.0 specification has reached stable!

Lint, Docs and Workflow

• Julien fixed an issue where the ESLint configuration was defining ContentTaskUtils as a global variable available for all tests (it is only available within certain test functions).

New Tab Page

• New Tab is now packaged as a built-in addon on the Beta channel! This sets us up to try our first pilot out-of-band update to New Tab sometime in May.
• Nathan has added ASRouter / OMC plumbing to make it possible to show onboarding messages inline within New Tab. The first use of this capability will be to highlight the new Custom Wallpapers feature

Performance

• Thanks to Jason Jones who submitted a patch that lets us avoid updating zoom-control elements within the AppMenu when the menu is still in the “lazy” state!

Places

• Moritz has fixed cases where bookmarks were sorted wrongly in the view after moving multiple of them at once. Bug 1557853

Profile Management

• Big picture
  • 100% release timeline planning is well underway with Nimbus, OMC, and DI teams
  • We are starting to look at testing across multiple Firefox instances using Marionette or using background tasks. Reach out if you have suggestions or ideas.
• Bugs fixed in the past 2 weeks:
  • tschuster fixed bug 1883387, suppressing a telemetry error shown at startup on linux
  • Jared fixed bug 1933264 and bug 1956105 to locally propagate changes to data policy preferences between profiles in a group
  • Teddy fixed bug 1934921 – Voice over reads the “Edit your profile” title as Article
  • Cieara fixed bug 1949022 – ‘Customize your new profile’ does not have the correct heading level
  • Teddy fixed bug 1950198 – Correct styling details for profile editor
  • Teddy fixed bug 1950199 – Correct styling details for profile toolbar menu
  • Niklas fixed bug 1950250 – <img> used in Theme radios buttons need null alt text
  • Niklas fixed bug 1952985 – Update theme names
  • Jared fixed bug 1955222 – remove profile name input autofocus on about:editprofile and about:newprofile pages to improve screen readerability with NVDA
  • Dave fixed bug 1926997 – Selectable Profile directory permissions are incorrect
  • Cieara fixed bug 1955036 – Double focus ring on edit button in Profiles submenu of FxA toolbar button menu
  • Niklas fixed bug 1955397 – Avatars and profiles panel and cards display mixed themes colours after switching themes
  • Teddy fixed bug 1956286 – The selected theme and avatar don’t remain focused, as specified in the Figma guidelines
  • Cieara fixed bug 1955244 – Update the SUMO URL in the profiles Learn More links
  • Dave fixed bug 1954832 – [macOS] The Original profile can’t be reached when all the other profiles are Unicode-named

Search and Navigation

• Daisuke fixed issues with the search button panel not being dismissed properly: Bug 1953920, Bug 1953927
• Dale improved matching for some quick actions: page source, screenshot, developer tools, help, firefox view, and history. Bug 1953498, Bug 1953494, Bug 1953488, Bug 1953482, Bug 1953489 Bug 1953478
• Yazan has addressed problems in the embedded calculator related to formatting, negative, and large numbers. Bug 1955018, Bug 1954066, Bug 1953073