These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 75

Highlights

• We’ve added a new section to about:preferences to opt-in to experimental features!
  • Go to about:preferences, and look for “Experiments” on the left-hand side.
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    Feeling experimental? Check these options out!

• Firefox Lockwise (about:logins) now supports Login Export to a .csv file
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    Your data is yours – so take your passwords and do what you will with them.

• There’s a new WebRTC global sharing indicator enabled on Nightly!
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    This indicator can be dragged anywhere on screen and minimized, and works on all desktop platforms.

  • Noticed any issues? File bugs against this metabug for us to triage.
• We need more Nightly users to help us test Fission!
  • Original announcement requesting testers on dev-platform
  • The team will soon add Fission to the about:preferences Experiments section, but in the meantime, you can opt-in to trying it by going to about:config and setting fission.autostart to true, and restarting
• The DevTools team has merged the Messages side panel into the Response side panel (bug) in the Network tool. So, WebSocket frames are now displayed in the Response panel
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Friends of the Firefox team

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

Fixed more than one bug

• ariasuni
• Farooq AR
• Itiel
• kenrick95
• Kriyszig
• Kyle Knaggs
• manas
• Mark Smith [:mcs]
• petcuandrei
• Richard Sherman :rich :richorrichard
• Sebastian Zartner [:sebo]
• Sonia
• Stepan Stava [:stepan]

New contributors (:star2: = first patch)

• :star2: a.park0324 got rid of a leftover console.log statement in our search service code
• Alex J Garcia fixed a bug in how panel widths are persisted and restored in the debugger
• Arash Fotouhi made it so that about:telemetry shows labels for categorical keyed histograms
• Harsh made it so that WebExtensions can observer and modify network requests made when using the downloads API
• Riley Byrd, one of our MSU capstone students, ported the migration wizard code to Fluent
• :star2: Deepika Karanji improved an error message when using the tabs.query WebExtension API
• :star2: Richard Sherman :rich :richorrichard
  • Added some helpful tooltips to the debugger
  • Improved some of the language in the debugger
• Jerome Fray greatly improved the dark mode support for the Library window
• Krystle Salazar added a new icon when viewing pages that have no identity information associated with them
• Kyle Knaggs
  • Moved the icon in the debugger “paused” indicator from the right to the left side
  • Cleaned up some of the debugger paused indicator code
• Marinella made the code that updates the Protections panel more efficient
• :star2: Surya Balakrishnan [:surya_b] made more of our DevTools UI respect the “prefers reduced motion” user preference

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

WebExtensions Framework

• As part of the Fission-related changes to the WebExtensions internals, the extension messaging APIs have been completely ported to the new Fission-aware WebExtension internals (Bug 1583484, and follow up fixesBug 1643214, Bug 1642967 , Bug 1643896 )
• New rkv-based ExtensionPermissions backend ( Bug 1637680 ,Bug 1646181). Thanks Agi!
• New rust-based storage.sync implementation enabled by default in Firefox 79 ( Bug 1634615 , Bug 1629127 , Bug 1645598 )

WebExtension APIs

• Fixed regressions:
  • Mak fixed a regression in the downloads API that would make valid downloads to fail (Bug 1637973, originally regressed byBug 1598216)
  • Rob fixed a regression related to webRequest API listeners ability to modify CSP headers on the requests intercepted (Bug 1635781, regressed byBug 1462989)
• Contributions:
  • Starting from Firefox 79, a new browser.tabs.warmup API method is available to the WebExtensions (Bug 1402256). The WebExtensions will be able to use this method to improve user perceived performance on switching between tabs). Thanks to ariasuni for contributing this enhancement!
  • In Firefox 79, browser.tabs.duplicate API method does now ensure that duplicated tabs are created as active, as in Chrome (Bug 1376088). Thanks ariasuni
  • dpk contributed a patch to improve error messages when invalid patterns are used in browser.tabs.query (Bug 1637431)
  • Sonia Singla contributed a patch to not show the WebExtensions contextMenu related to bookmarks on entries without a bookmarkGuid (Bug 1638360)
  • Myeongjun Go contributed a patch to allow localhost’s http urls as search providers defined in a WebExtensions manifest
  • Harsh contributed a patch to allow extensions to observe and modify requests created using the browser.downloads.download API (Bug 1579911)

Addon Manager & about:addons

• Removed built-in certificate requirement for addon updates and installs when signed extensions are required (Bug 1308251)
• other issues and/or regressions fixed in AOM and about:addons:
  • error logged when non-extension add-ons or the browser are being updated (Bug 1643854, regressed byBug 1618500)
  • addon install cancellation ignored when the addon has been already downloaded (Bug 1559683)
  • addon details page not loaded as expected when clicking the add-on title in the about:addons list view (Bug 1645286)
  • missing select dropdown in extensions options_ui page when embedded into a about:addons page (Bug 1647727)

Developer Tools

• Remote Debugging Added forward, back, and refresh buttons to remote debugging experience (bug)
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• Console Panel – 4XX and 5XX requests are now displayed as error in the console, and don’t need the Request/XHR filter to be enabled (bug)
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• Accessibility – Several improvements for a11y contributed by MarcoZ. More parts of the DevTools UI is now accessible to screen readers (bug, bug , bug , bug )
• Console Panel – Blocked requests have a distinct style in the console (bug)
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• Debugger Panel – Debugger shows also sources cleaned up by GC (bug)

• Network Panel – slow requests are marked with a turtle icon. Slow = Waiting for the response from the server is > 500 ms (bug). Default value stored in devtools.netmonitor.audits.slow
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• Network Panel – support for Server Side Events (SSE) coming in 80. Visualization for text/event-stream content types (bug, test page ). Hidden behind a pref: devtools.netmonitor.features.sse
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Fission

• about:certificate now uses the JSWindowActor powered RemotePageManager
• Follow the teams progress by checking out Are We Fission Yet?

Password Manager

• Create a backup of logins.json upon writing to it.
  • Other consumers of JSONFile.jsm can opt-in to backups with the `backupTo` option.
• Add event telemetry for when logins.json.corrupt is created
• Stop migrating logins from SQLite to JSON via LoginImport.jsm
• Landing this week
  • CSV Login Import
  • Automatically restoring from logins.json backups

PDFs & Printing

• Added a context menu item in the Downloads Panel to “Open in system viewer” and “Always open in system viewer”
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Performance

• emalysz and Gijs have converted a number of panels to be lazily loaded
• emalysz landed a patch to make it so that the new DLL preloading behaviour can be controlled with a preference , which we’re going to use to power an experiment in July. This experiment should allow us to estimate the impact of improving startup performance on user retention.
• dthayer has finished a patch that will allow more things to be read from the startupcache which should improve startup – should land shortly now that the soft-freeze is over
• mconley landed automated tests for the about:home startup cache , and also landed some improvements to how it invalidates .
• bigiri has a working version of porting the ASRouter module to JSWindowActors, which is needed for the about:home startup cache. Now working on migrating tests.
• dthayer fixed the last blocker preventing us from moving Nightly to Fast Shutdown stage 3, which should happen shortly now that the soft freeze is over
• dthayer advanced Beta and Release to Fast Shutdown stage 1, which should improve shutdown on those channels starting in Firefox 79.

Performance Tools

• Moredetailed IPC marker tooltips , showing latency, so that we can differentiate between IPC overhead and event loop delays.
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• Disabled animations if ui.prefersReducedMotion is set in about:config.
• Added profiler markers for Telemetry Stopwatch
  • Example startup profile: https://share.firefox.dev/3dnKw2B
• Replaced Services.profiler.AddMarker with ChromeUtils.addProfilerMarker.

Remote Protocol (Chrome DevTools Protocol subset)

• When navigating to web pages with iframes included, all relevant page navigation events are sent out for each and every frame now. To get this finished variousother small fixes were necessary too. The formerly added preference remote.frames.enabled is no longer necessary because frame handling is enabled by default now.
• For the next while, the team will be focused on making Marionette Fission compatible. In the meantime, we’ll be gathering feedback from Puppeteer users and anyone else experimenting with Remote Protocol before we resume our work in that area.

Search and Navigation

Search:

• Some reliability fixes for modern configuration.
• Post-modern cleanup is now underway and is currently reworking how the search engine cache and initialization routines are handled.
• Region detection
  • We’re now experimenting with doing regular checks for your region and updating it if you’ve changed location for more than a couple of weeks (before Region used to be static all the time, unless we explicitly reset it) –Bug 1627555
  • Better support to customize params depending on the region –Bug 1634580
  • Experiment will run in Beta to check reliability

Address Bar:

• Address bar expansion on focus now obeys prefers-reduced-motion –Bug 1629303
• On Windows it’s now possible to close the results panel by clicking on the toolbox draggable space –Bug 1628948
• Fixed a regression where search suggestions were not provided anymore when restricting to search (with “?” or an alias) –Bug 1648385
• Search suggestions will now be shown for a broader range of search strings (But not when the typed string looks like a url) –Bug 1628079
• Search history is enabled by default in Firefox 78 and obeys the same preference as normal search suggestions –Bug 1643475
• Fixed a bug where certain domains (like “pserver”) may be transformed into others when typed and confirmed without a protocol –Bug 1646928
• A new browser.urlbar.dnsResolveSingleWordsAfterSearch preference allows to disable post-facto DNS resolution of single word searches that may be valid intranet names –Bug 1642943
• Restriction tokens at the end of the search string are considered only if they are preceded by a space (Searching for “c++” now works correctly) –Bug 1636961
• Tail search suggestions are enabled in EARLY_BETA_OR_EARLIER; release enabling is pending a Firefox 78 experiment –Bug 1645059 (demo: search for “hobbit holes for sale in i”)

WebRTC UI

• The new sharing indicator works on every desktop platform and can be minimized and moved anywhere on the screen.
• Starting work on a feature to show a highlight around shared browser windows or screens , to make it easier to know what’s been shared.