Firefox Headlines (November 18, 2021)

[Harry Twyford]

Hello Firefox fans!

The Firefox Desktop team has been brewing these updates for weeks. Now we present them to you, farm-to-table: they're organic, direct trade, and locally roasted.

Many thanks to Mike Conley, Bernard Igiri, and Katherine Patenio, who helped put these updates together.

Highlights

• A big thank you to all the Outreachy applicants who applied for this cycle.
• We had 38 applicants with approximately 110 contributions between them.
• Special shout-out to Antonin, a volunteer contributor who fixed a 22 year old printing bug, adding support for printing even/odd pages!
• Some great contributions to Picture-in-Picture from volunteers, including:
• Falguni Islam fixed an issue where sometimes the wrong window was being focused when unpip’ing a player window
• shirshak fixed an issue where controls wouldn’t easily hide after fullscreening a PiP player window
• Firefox MSIX package released to the Microsoft store!
• June Wilde introduced a new “browser.privacy.network.globalPrivacyControl” read-only setting to the WebExtensions API, which will allow extensions to observe the Global Privacy Control status starting in Firefox 95
• Reading big profiler buffers to capture a profile is now dramatically faster, thanks to Gerald’s work!
• Fission rollout to release is underway! It’s going smoothly so far. We aim to have Fission enabled for about half of the release population next week sometime. If all goes well, it’ll be enabled for all of our release population by the end of the month!

Friends of the Firefox team

Introductions/Shout-Outs

• Welcome Mandy Cheang [:mcheang] to the Search team!

For contributions from November 2nd to November 16th 2021, inclusive.

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

Fixed more than one bug

• Clinton
• Evgenia Kotovich
• John Bieling (:TbSync)
• Jonas Jenwald [:Snuffleupagus]
• raquel...@gmail.com

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

• Angelina updated the HTML filter in the DevTools Netmonitor to also list xhtml files.
• 🌟Jane Kotovich implemented securityHandler in the pdf.js scripting API.
• Danielle Lamoureux fixed the appearance of checkboxes in macOS High Contrast Mode.
• 🌟Nils André-Chang fixed some typos in code comments.
• Miriam Onuoha fixed dark mode colors on the new tab page.
• Onuoha Oluebube removed uses of OS.File from sessionstore tests.
• Raquel Vargas removed various uses of the second ChromeUtils.import argument and removed uses of OS.File from various tests.
• 🌟Shirshak fixed an issue where the picture-in-picture window wouldn’t hide its controls.
• 🌟sirri fixed an issue where Deprecated.jsm was logging junk.
• Clinton removed the uses of lodash `without` in the DevTools Debugger and fixed an issue where extra indentation was being inserted into CSS rules copied from the DevTools inspector. 

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

WebExtensions Framework

• Emilio fixed a bug that was preventing users to interact with browserAction popups using touch screens - Bug 1696786 (regressed in Firefox 86 by enabling APZ in popups loading a document in a child process, Bug 1493208)
• Fixed a bug in the child processes initialization, which was preventing the permissions to be correctly transmitted from the parent to the child process once a non-http/https blob url is created and new processes spawned - Bug 1738713
• NOTE: technically this wasn’t an extension-specific issue, but it was easy enough to trigger by extensions using the “browser.contentScripts.register” API method and so it happened to be reported to us as a WebExtensions issue  
• As part of the ongoing work related to the “Manifest Version 3 background service worker”, we have landed some more changes to notify the WebExtensions internals when a background service worker is being spawned, loaded and destroyed - Bug 1728326 (still only enabled on Nightly along with other parts of the “MV3 background service workers” internals)

Fluent

• flod has written up some excellent documentation on localization best practices that we should all check out.
• Juicy tidbit: did you know that “Save document?” in English becomes “A bheil thu airson an sgrìobhainn a shàbhaladh” in Gaelic? So be careful with static dimensions for things containing text!

Form Autofill

• :dimi fixed a race condition in autocomplete and form autofill that kept causing issues in the GeckoView autocomplete tests
• :tgiles fixed the credit card cardholder name not being recognized on amazon.de due to a missing heuristic

High-Contrast Mode (MSU Capstone project)

• Danielle added a blue/accent colour to checkboxes in HCM
• Noah is investigating an HCM issue on Windows 7: context menu items aren’t visible when hovered/selected
• Is also looking into fixing a test failure resulting from a Picture-in-Picture fix he made
• Avi is working on a MacOS issue where the focus ring isn’t visible around the edit bookmark panel’s “Save” button

Desktop Integrations (Installer & Updater)

• Major a11y performance regression for MSIX installations fixed (thanks Jamie!)

Lint, Docs and Workflow

• ChromeUtils.import second argument removal (needed for switching to es6 modules as backstage pass is not available):
• Raquel fixed the enterprise policy code, and some test files under browser/. 

Password Manager 

• :dimi added the ability to identify high-value sites using password-related heuristics so that sites can be isolated on Android Fission
• :dimi fixed an autofill issue where Firefox was autofilling into a spam detection/honeypot field on certain sites
• :sgalich is working on the highly requested feature of being able to regenerate passwords in the autocomplete dropdown

Performance

• emilio has a nice optimization that avoids creating some DOM structures for panels during window creation and startup.
• Lots of work has been happening to get rid of OS.File usage, like:
• raquelvargas removing OS.File usage from various browser tests!
• emcminn removing OS.File usage from the RemoteL10n module!
• onuohaoluebube05 removing OS.File usage from various SessionStore tests!
• barret is back from leave, and is filing bugs for tricky IOUtils situations.

Screenshots

• Ongoing work to develop a browser component version of Screenshots
• Nbaumgardner fixed Bug 1649915 - Screenshots saved as larger JPG instead of smaller PNG
• Thanks for cpeterson for fixing Bug 1739563 - Replace screenshots' makeUuid.js with crypto.randomUUID()

Below the fold

[mconley] Firefox::General triage! Interested in seeing the process? You can join the audience this Thursday, November 18th from 1PM - 1:30PM ET. Zoom link. There’ll be another one on Thursday, November 25th from 1PM - 1:45PM ET at the same link.

—

This information, including all of the previous updates, are fully available in this doc: https://docs.google.com/a/mozilla.com/document/d/1u9YH3ULNRYg6G-fN-Udkvfkcvg0alJfzi_zIAfFNkL8/edit?usp=sharing

Also note that I'm really just synthesizing and humanizing the stuff that's on the Wiki, which is freely available from here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Meeting, so check that out if you want the source material. It'll also be posted (minus the Below the Fold stuff) to the Nightly blog.

Finally, if there's a Firefox-ish team that you feel isn't being represented here, please let them know about the above meeting so we can get their updates.

Keep on rockin' the free web,

Harry