Firefox 144 Highlights: Faster Add-ons, Smarter DevTools, and Tab Group Boosts – These Weeks in Firefox, Issue 189

Highlights

• Leo Liu [:leoliu] added a panel for AntiTracking debugging (#1972771) behind devtools.anti-tracking.enabled

• Alexandre Poirot [:ochameau] added a “User-defined” badge in the markup view event tooltip to differentiate them from “native” events (and possibly spotting event not supported in Firefox) (#1977628)

• Nicolas Chevobbe [:nchevobbe] added a “Jump to definition” icon for CSS variables in the Inspector Rules view (#1278517)

Friends of the Firefox team

Introductions/Shout-Outs

• New contributor Merci chao has filed a whole bunch of valid and useful tab group bugs

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

Volunteers that fixed more than one bug

• Alexander Kuleshov

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

• Josh Berry added groupId to browser.tabs.onUpdated event
• Jacqueline Amherst [:jqln] moved gPrivateBrowsingUI to its own file and avoid loading it unless/until we encounter our first private window

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

Addon Manager & about:addons

• InstallTrigger API implementation has been fully removed in Firefox 144 🥳 – Bug 1776426 / Bug 1979227
  • Thanks to Gregory Pappas for the immense help on this one!
• Fixed issue with add-on updates automatically cancelled due to new extension metadata property missing from previously installed add-ons – Bug 1984724
• Improved spacing between about:addons add-on card message bars and add-ons card header – Bug 1984872
  • Thanks to Sujal Singh for contributing this improvement to the about:addons cards!

WebExtensions Framework

• Fixed Customize mode and keyboard shortcuts issue hit when a user may have clicked to the “extension settings” link from the add-on post-install dialog – Bug 1983869
• Fixed regression preventing SVG icons associated with extension context menu items to be loaded successfully – Bug 1986618 (fixed in the Firefox 143, same Firefox version where the regression was initially introduced through Bug 1979338).

WebExtension APIs

• In Firefox 144 browser.storage.local and browser.storage.managed WebExtensions API are now also providing a getBytesInUse API method – Bug 1385832
  • Thanks to Nathan Gross for contributing this enhancement to the WebExtensions storage APIs!
• Added missing groupId property to the browser.tabs.onUpdated API method – Bug 1984553.
  • Thanks to Josh Berry for reporting and fixing this gap in our WebExtensions API JSONSchema definitions
  • NOTE: this change mainly matters for TypeScript type definitions being generated based on our JSONSchema definitions. The groupId property was set in the browser.tabs.onUpdated API event details even without this fix to the JSONSchema.

DevTools

• Artem Manushenkov
  • documented “Enable Split Console” setting and added missing alt attributes for images and updated the screenshot (#1984296, #1981384, #1984788)
  • removed unused npm scripts from the debugger folder (#1984661)
  • added keyboard shortcuts for clearing the console in the clear button title (#1984993)
• Sebastian Zartner [:sebo] added a inactive CSS warning for usage of overflow on non-block containers (#1583902)
• Riz removed Chrome frames from Netmonitor stack traces (#1280266)
• Robert Longson [:longsonr] fixed an issue where we would show an invalid message to users when devtools.netmonitor.requestBodyLimit=0 (#1986196)
• David Shin[:dshin] fixed a Chrome-Only method to make the selector highlighter work for @scope rules (#1980210)
• Masayuki Nakano [:masayuki] fixed the “Break on node removal” feature when a node is removed because a parent node’s innerHTML is updated (#1984312)
• Holger Benl [:hbenl] fixed an issue with screenshots in Responsive Design Mode (#1979518)
• Alexandre Poirot [:ochameau] made React avoid updates for devtools in inactive/background tab (#1897765)
• Alexandre Poirot [:ochameau] fixed fetching iframe source content in the Debugger (#1977100)
• Alexandre Poirot [:ochameau] fixed opening some webpack-internal:///./ source from console stack traces (#1982271)
• Hubert Boma Manilla (:bomsy) made it possible to see server sent events in the Netmonitor event if the connection is still open (#1830230)
• Julian Descottes [:jdescottes] fixed an issue that would crash DevTools (#1979448)
• Julian Descottes [:jdescottes] improved performance of a regexp we use to check if a given network request is local (#1983755)

WebDriver BiDi

• Sasha updated “emulation.setLocaleOverride” and “emulation.setTimezoneOverride” commands to also apply overrides to the existing sandboxes created with WebDriver BiDi.
• Sasha implemented the “emulation.setScreenOrientationOverride” command, which allows clients to override screen orientation per browsing or user contexts.
• Henrik reverted the scrollIntoView algorithm for elements in Marionette to always use the instant scroll behavior. This undoes the change introduced in Firefox 97, which had switched the behavior to auto. The reversion addresses potential race conditions when scrolling elements that use smooth behavior.
• Julian updated the ”browsingContext.navigate” to succeed and stop throwing errors if the navigation was interrupted by another navigation. Typically this could happen with a script updating “window.location”.

Lint, Docs and Workflow

• mlucks turned on the ESLint Lit rule, no-value-attribute.
• Standard8 fixed verbose logging for mach lint.

Profile Management

• We have been incrementally rolling out, currently at 5.5%, and profiles telemetry data looks good.
• OMC and Nimbus completed migration to the multi-profile datastore, their integration testing and telemetry data also looks healthy.
• We are planning for a full rollout in 144 (excluding win 10 users until we have backup support for multiple profiles)
• Closed bugs:
  • Contributor fix! 🎉 Alexander Kuleshov fixed bug 1987225, Remove unused gRestartMode variable.
• Other bugs closed out:
  • 1950741     When a non-system theme is selected in about:newprofile, overscrolling the page displays a different page background in the overscrolled area     mlucks@mozilla.com
  • 1950743     Tabbing to the “Explore more themes” link in about:newprofile makes the link’s focus ring span the entire container instead of just the link     squiles@mozilla.com
  • 1966284     hide new profile manager pages (new, edit, delete) from about:about     mlucks@mozilla.com
  • 1979898     Remove some of the extraneous directories added when using MOZ_APP_DATA     dtownsend@mozilla.com
  • 1984193     Add hover tooltips to avatar picker     mlucks@mozilla.com
  • 1985340     Update Profiles avatars’ alt text to match tooltip text     mlucks@mozilla.com
  • 1986080     Update Profiles avatars’ aria label text to match tooltip text     mlucks@mozilla.com

Search and Navigation

• adw is continuing to work on Google Lens which is a feature that allows users to search images by using the context menu (1987045, 1986301)
• Standard8 has been working on an experiment to send Search Suggestions over Oblivious HTTP for privacy (1984624)
• Standard8 converted the urlbar code to use moz-src URIs.
• Mandy has been working on adding localized trending URL results for Perplexity which is still hidden behind an experiment. (1985515, 1984201)
• Dao is working on making the address bar more modular for other features to use. For example, there’s been work done to prepare the search bar.  (1985734,  1985833, 1986128,1986129)
• Mortiz and adw continue to work on displaying relevant dates for suggest (1986685, 1986786, 1981490, 1986680,
• Daisuke is working on yelp online suggestions (1986224)
• Dale is working on the unified trust panel which will inform users if the site is secure. This is a new design that combines the privacy shield and page information icons and dialogs. (1976108)

Storybook/Reusable Components/Acorn Design System

• Some new docs related to Figma Code Connect on Storybook
  • Mostly about adding new Code Connects but that section goes over the usage in Figma Dev Mode
• More border-radius tokens filled out and are in the tokens table on Storybook
• Moz-promo now avoids wrapping actions until necessary (prefers being one line) Storybook (narrow example)
• MozLitElements that use the automatic fluent data-l10n-attrs population (setting fluent: true in the property definition) can now have additional per-instance data-l10n-attrs (this attribute is now added to, rather than being replaced) Bug 1987682
  • This could be useful especially for moz-button accesskey which is not currently a fluent attribute due to Bug 1945032 (if you have a hidden HTML element with an accesskey it will still fire, gonna stop doing that in chrome documents since that’s how XUL worked)

Tab Groups

• dwalker polished the “active tab in a collapsed group” feature (1979067, 1971388)
• jswinarton polishing the collapsed tab group hover preview panel (1981197, 1971235, 1981201, 1983054)
  • Now in Nightly, likely release in Firefox 145
• Enormous shout-out to contributor Merci chao for 17 tab group bugs filed in the last month! All of them are written well, actionable, and sometimes even include fixes