Firefox Headlines (September 21st, 2021)

[Mike Conley]

Hello firefox-dev,

Just a few weeks ago, the Firefox Desktop team got together to share notes, collaborate, and talk about the recent happenings in the code base. A few of us stuck around after the meeting to turn the meeting notes into something a little easier to digest. Enjoy!

Special thanks to Katherine Patenio who put these notes together with me.

Highlights

• Firefox 92 was released today!

• We’re 96% through M1 for Fluent migration! Great work from kpatenio and niklas!

• [Screenshot]

• Caption: A graph showing how Fluent strings have overtaken DTD strings over time as the dominant string mechanism in browser.xhtml. As of September 2nd, it shows that there are 732 Fluent strings and 32 DTD strings in browser.xhtml

• Fluent is our new localization framework

• We have improvements coming soon for our downloads panel! You can opt in by enabling browser.download.improvements_to_download_panel in about:config.

• Nightly now has an about:unloads page to show some of the locally collected heuristics being used to decide which tabs to unload on memory pressure. You can also manually unload tabs from here.

• As part of Fission-related changes, we’ve rearchitected some of the internals of the WebExtensions framework - see Bug 1708243

• If you notice recent addons-related regressions in Nightly 94 and Beta 93 (e.g. like Bug 1729395, affecting the multi-account-containers addon), please file a bug and needinfo us (rpl or zombie).

Friends of the Firefox team

For contributions from August 25th to September 7th 2021, inclusive.

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

Fixed more than one bug

• Ava Katushka

• Itiel

• Michael Kohler [:mkohler]

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

• 🌟 themel10rist removed an extra menu separator in about:logins

• 🌟 rubencm added a patch to force date picker years to be in a valid range

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

Addon Manager & about:addons

• :gregtatum landed in Firefox 93 a follow up to Bug 1722087 to migrate users away from the old recommended themes that have been removed from the omni.jar - Bug 1723602.

WebExtension APIs

• extension.getViews now returns existing sidebar extension pages also when called with a `windowId` filter - Bug 1612390 (closed by one of the changes landed as part of Bug 1708243)

Downloads Panel

• Ava wrapped up her Outreachy internship last week (thank you!). Some of her work includes these exciting changes / features to Firefox downloads and can be tested when the browser.download.improvements_to_download_panel is enabled:

• Removing the “What should Firefox do with this file?” modal prompt by default to enable a more seamless downloading experience

• In-progress files can be queued to open when clicking on it from the downloads panel

• See meta-bug for this project: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1710926 

• We plan to enable these changes for just Firefox Nightly in 95. Currently, we are working on fixing tests when the pref is enabled

Fluent

• Katherine and Niklas have been burning through bugs in the Fluent M1 metabug

Form Autofill

• Bug 1687684 - Fix credit card autofill when the site prefills fields

• Bug 1688209 - Prevent simple hidden fields from being eligible for autofill.

High-Contrast Mode (MSU Capstone project)

• Molly and Micah have kicked off another semester working with MSU capstone students. They’ll be helping us make a number of improvements to high-contrast mode on Firefox Desktop. See this meta bug to follow along.

• We’ll be doing a hack weekend on September 11 & 12 where students will get ramped up on their first bugs and tools needed to do Firefox development.

Lint, Docs and Workflow

• ESLint is now fully enabled on all docshell files.

• We now have Services.uuid. ESLint will fail if you try to use the Cc[].getService()caller. Hopefully ESLint will soon fail for XPCOMUtils.getLazyServiceGetter(s) as well.

Password Manager

• Welcome Serg Galich, he’ll be working on credential management with Tim and Dimi. 

Search and Navigation

• Drew landed some early UI changes, part of Firefox Suggest, in Nightly. In particular, labels have been added to Address Bar groups. A goal of Firefox Suggest is to provide smarter and more useful results, and better grouping, while also improving our understanding of how the address bar results are perceived. More experiments are still ongoing and planned for the short future.

• Daisuke landed a performance improvement to the address bar tokenizer. Bug 1726837 

Below the fold

• [mconley] I did an “Intro to Firefox Desktop Engineering” that I recorded and put on YouTube while livestreaming. Maybe useful for folks who want foundational underpinnings on some Firefox Desktop concepts.

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,

-Mike