Smarter Search, Smoother Tools – These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 190

Highlights

• Google Lens support has been turned on by default in the latest nightly builds.
  • When Google is your default search engine, and you right click an image you’ll see a new context menu entry:

• Semantic history search has now also been enabled in the latest nightly and beta builds.
  • This uses a local machine learning model to suggest entries from history that are related to your searches based on natural language understanding in the address bar.
• Alexandre Poirot [:ochameau] improved the editor by displaying an editor widget where you can navigate between the different calls to a given function (#1908889)

• The WebExtension cookies.set API method rejection on invalid cookies is riding the Firefox 145 release train (after it has been kept as a nightly only behavior for 3 nightly cycles) – Bug 1976509

Friends of the Firefox team

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

Volunteers that fixed more than one bug

• Isaac Briandt

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

• David [:david-loe] improved accessibility of timepicker
• Isaac Briandt updated build-bergamot.py and upload-bergamot.py to utilize zstd compression and updated Translations RemoteSettings schemas
• 🌟 Vlad L updated ipv6 representation algorithm

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

Addon Manager & about:addons

• As part of finalizing the Add-ons telemetry migration from legacy telemetry to Glean, the EnvironmentAddonBuilder (responsible for collecting the activeAddons/Theme/GMPlugins metrics in Glean and mirror it in the legacy telemetry environment) has been refactored out of the TelemetryEnvironment ES module – Bug 1981496

DevTools

• Sebastian Zartner [:sebo] added inactive CSS icon when overflow* properties are used in non-block, non-flex, non-grid containers (#1583898)
• Artem Manushenkov fixed a memory leak in the Inspector (#1986144)
• Holger Benl [:hbenl] fixed an issue where screenshots taken in Responsive Design Mode could have unexpected dimensions (#1979518)
• Nicolas Chevobbe [:nchevobbe] made the Accessibility panel color simulation persist on page reload (#1770707)
• Alexandre Poirot [:ochameau] fixed a Debugger crash that could happen when clicking on stacktrace frames from the console (#1985446)
• Hubert Boma Manilla (:bomsy) fixed Debugger pretty printing of sources containing characters represented by more than one code unit (#1985689)
• Hubert Boma Manilla (:bomsy) updated the version of Babel which we’re using to handle top level await detection, which fixed a few issues (#1900314)
• Alexandre Poirot [:ochameau] fixed an issue in the Network pane (reported by Jake), where the search would never complete (#1983792)
• Julian Descottes [:jdescottes] fixed a Network Monitor crash that was occurring when setting network override on requests requiring CORS preflight (#1986615)
• Nicolas Chevobbe [:nchevobbe] fixed an issue that was affecting the Changes panel on pages with multiple documents (that includes the Browser Toolbox) (#1798774)

WebDriver BiDi

• Henrik disabled the BackupService component by default for the Remote Protocol (Marionette / WebDriver BiDi), as it isn’t required for web automation tasks.
• Julian implemented the `browsingContext.downloadEnd` event, which is emitted either when a download is completed or canceled.
• Sasha implemented the “emulation.setUserAgentOverride” command for WebDriver BiDi, allowing clients to override the user agent string per browsing context, user context, or globally in Firefox + also fixed Bug 1705326 – navigator.userAgent still returns custom UA after clearing browsingContext.customUserAgent if a reload happened while the custom UA was set
• Bug fixes
  • Julian updated the browsingContext.downloadWillBegin event to emit the correct `navigation` id, either the same one as the corresponding `browsingContext.navigationStarted` event, or null if the download was started by a link with a `download` attribute.
  • Julian fixed a crash occurring when `network.provideResponse` was used to override a response requiring a CORS preflight.
  • Julian fixed a bug with network events incorrectly flagged as blocked (`isBlocked=true`), even if they were not blocked for technical reasons – eg. coming from memory cache or using `data` scheme.
  • Julian updated the `network.beforeRequestSent` events to have `destination` set to “document” for top-level loads.
  • Julian fixed an encoding issue with `network.getData` which will now always use utf-8 when serializing as text.
  • Julian also updated `network.getData` to no longer throw if the response body is empty.

Lint, Docs and Workflow

• First mentioned a month ago, the tier-3 TypeScript linter has now been fixed so that it runs when the components it watches are touched. Previously it would only be run when the type information was changed.
• ESLint
  • We discovered the require-jsdoc rules were not being applied due to a mistake when upgrading to flat config or ESLint v9. These have now been re-enabled, with follow-ups being landed to fix the new issues raised since the mistake was introduced.
  • The no-browser-refs-in-toolkit rule has now been promoted to an error, except for cases where it currently fails (stays as a warning). Please avoid introducing new cases.
  • The ESLint configuration inspector should now be working when run against firefox-main. This is a very useful tool for inspecting the configuration and determining which globals and rules are applied to which files.
  • Gijs updated our documentation for ESLint environments, which no longer work in the same way with v9.
    • /** eslint-env foo */ no longer works.
    • The files either need the correct extensions, or adding to eslint-file-globals.config.mjs. See the comments at the top of the file for more information.

Information Management/Sidebar

• There’s been a few fixes for the drag-to-pin work that’s in 143; these will be in the dot release.
  • Add a check for promo card to ensure we don’t show it prematurely
  • 1989344 – Adjust interaction cue timing for drag to pin
• Nikki has improved tab animation for vertical and horizontal tabs with tab stacking
• Split View work is still early days but the meta bug is here.
• We’re aiming to get sidebar.revamp turned on by default in Nightly only in 145 so we’re greening up a few tests then work on some old sidebar parity bugs before enabling this in release.

Profile Management

• Jared fixed bug 1941854, [Windows] Additional window (skeleton UI) opens with Profile Selector on Firefox startup
• Maile fixed bug 1955173, The favicons of the Profiles about: pages are not displayed properly in the List all tabs menu
• Niklas fixed bug 1965598, The Usage Profile Group ID should be shared by all profiles in a group
• Jaws fixed bug 1987317, Firefox won’t launch a profile if the library of that profile is open
• Jaws fixed bug 1988882, SelectableProfileService uses the wrong value for the rgb color property
• Jaws fixed bug 1990020, Small fixes in SelectableProfileService

Search and Navigation

• Work continues on modularising and re-using the address bar code to replace the existing search bar.
  • This will allow us to simplify the existing code, remove dependence on the toolkit autocomplete widget, and bring more features to the separate search bar.
• Search Engines identifiers and telemetry.
  • We’ve now removed nsISearchEngine.identifier, and deprecated nsISearchEngine.telemetryId. nsISearchEngine.id still exists.
    • These are fields that would contain a mixture of information about a search engine (an identifier, partner code and sometimes more). This would analysis via telemetry more difficult.
  • If you’re reporting search engine information either via telemetry or to other systems, please use the separate id / partnerCode fields on nsISearchEngine or check with the search team for your case.

Storybook/Reusable Components/Acorn Design System

• moz-button supports type=”split”(Bug 1858811). Setting menuId on the split button links its “More options” button to a panel-list with the same id. (Storybook)

• Support for the support-page attribute was added to the moz-box-item (Bug 1990839)
• New –font-size-xxlarge (2.2rem – 33px) token was added. (Bug 1961988)
• Usage of border-radius was updated to use design tokens values (Bug 1983938)