Firefox Headlines (July 22nd, 2021)
Doug Thayer
Highlights
tkikuchi added a new about:third-party page to visualize third-party modules injected into Firefox processes (Windows-only)
Ava made it possible to queue a download to be opened when it’s finished by clicking on it from the downloads panel (Bug 1711053). Available behind the browser.download.improvements_to_download_panel pref:
Simplify Page for Printing has been reintroduced in Firefox 90
In 91, the Fission Beta experiment is aiming to enable Fission for 15% of the population, including Linux users.
The Nightly rollout is being increased to 70%. At this point, more than half of our Nightly population has Fission enabled!
You can check to see if you have Fission enabled by going to about:support, and checking the “Fission Windows” field. If it shows a number greater than 0, congratulations! You’re running with Fission.
Improved dark mode support on macOS will launch in Firefox 91! (bug 1623686)
Friends of the Firefox team
For contributions from June 29th to July 13th 2021, inclusive.
Introductions/Shout-Outs
Resolved bugs (excluding employees)
Fixed more than one bug
Ava Katushka [:ava8katushka]
Kajal Sah [:kajalsah107]
Matthew N. [:MattN] ❤️
Michelle Goossens [:michelle]
New contributors (🌟 = first patch)
🌟 Cerkiewny alphabetically reordered case statements in aboutLogins.js
🌟 afrehner.work fixed a DevTools issue where custom properties that begin with numbers are shown as invalid
alej0hio2007 added support for dark mode in about:debugging
Ava Katushka made it so launching a download with a computer application is saved to directly to the Downloads folder and also wrote a test for downloads telemetry
Claudia Batista [:claubatista] added a fix that prevents DevTools from crashing when Host Header is not available
jha.ashray12 fixed an issue where params text would be empty in the Network Request side panel
Silke Hofmann refactored our remaining code to stop using “xlink:href” and instead use just “href”
Project Updates
Add-ons / Web Extensions
Addon Manager & about:addons
The theme previews for the builtin themes listed in about:addons have been updated to match the new Proton UI - Bug 1708717
WebExtension APIs
As part of the work related to the Manifest Version 3 WebExtensions, we Introduced a new “action” WebExtensions API namespace (in practice it is an alias of the current browserAction API, restricted to extensions with manifest_version set to 3) - Bug 1706398
Some new WebRender-related browserSettings have been introduced in Firefox 91:
browser.browserSettings.colorManagement.mode (values: “off” / “full” / “tagged_only”) and browser.browserSettings.colorManagement.useNativeSRGB (values: true / false) - Bug 1714428
browser.browserSettings.colorManagement.useWebRenderCompositor (values: true / false) - Bug 1719688
Downloads Panel
Other new changes behind the browser.download.improvements_to_download_panel pref:
Make “Save to disk” the default decision for files (Bug 1710941)
Download panel will automatically open when a download starts and there are no other downloads in progress (Bug 1709129)
Fission
In 91, the Fission Beta experiment is aiming to enable Fission for 15% of the population, including Linux users
The Nightly rollout is being increased to 70%. At this point, more than half of our Nightly population has Fission enabled!
Lint, Docs and Workflow
glandium turned on –enable-bootstrap by default
This means toolchains and other build dependencies (like node) will automatically be updated on `mach build` without the need to run `mach bootstrap`
marco turned on warnings in reviewbot. These are optional fixes which won’t cause a back out. This is the first time they are being surfaced by default
ESLint severity 1 issues are warnings
Other optional linters (like codespell) are also warnings
See full Engineering Effectiveness Newsletter for more
Standard8 landed a change to improve the documentation for our Mozilla specific ESLint rules.
macOS Spotlight
spohl is working on a fix for misaligned stoplight buttons in RTL locales (bug 1419375)
Work continues on improved fullscreen support, including being able to exit fullscreen with the Esc key (bug 1688584)
Work continues on improving memory pressure detection, which will reduce the number of prompts asking that apps be force quit.
Performance
The wider performance org published a blog post highlighting recent works!
barret has completed setting up the frame recording system for recording Firefox Desktop startup times! We still need to do some testing with this and hook up data visualization, but we suspect this will make it easier for us to detect user-perceivable wins and regressions on Firefox Desktop startup times for weak hardware.
mconley landed Nimbus experiment support for the about:home startup cache for Firefox 90, which rolls out to release today! We hope to do a Nimbus-powered experiment to see how the about:home startup cache impacts user retention (if at all).
Performance Tools
We published our first Performance Tools Newsletter blog post for H1 2021. Check it out if you want to learn more about what our team has worked on in the past 6 months.
Privacy/Security
pbz updated the site data manager in about:preferences to group storage by base domain (eTLD+1) and support clearing storage per “cookie jar”. Bug 1711869, Bug 1712170
vringar is working on making the site data clearing confirmation dialog nicer when we only clear data for a single base domain. Bug 1715499
vringar is adding a confirmation dialog before clearing data via “Forget About This Site”. Bug 1711759
Proton/MR1
Lots of icon de-duplications have landed, and we continue to pay down technical debt
The “Clear recent history” dialog is now using the new Proton style
emalysz has just landed a patch to restyle the menupopups for the Bookmarks Toolbar to match the Proton style
Search and Navigation
Harry fixed support for $ (url) and # (title) restriction tokens in the urlbar, though note they cannot be combined anymore with other restrictions. Bug 1719180
Harry converted the last remaining old style urlbar provider to a modern one - Bug 1717509
Gijs changed fixup to not generate alternate www.[...].com addresses for “http” and “https” strings. Bug 1719442
Screenshots
Kajal has gotten started on porting over screenshots to its own browser component.. This work is behind the `screenshots.browser.component.enabled` pref and we expect to land the initial parts in the coming weeks.
Below the fold
[mconley] Joy of Profiling - Open to the public!
Mondays, 10AM ET (Zoom ID: 98769155293)
[mconley] Recent kerfuffle in Mercurial-land with reload.svg
[Standard8] A reminder to use the phab-test-policy add-on to remind you to add the testing policy when approving a patch in phabricator.
[Standard8] Also a reminder to investigate the phab-conventional-comments add-on to help you make it clearer what each comment in a review is (e.g. nit, suggestion, issue etc).
[mconley] Using HTML custom elements in browser UI? Great! You can inherit from MozHTMLElement to get inheritedAttributes support. Just don’t forget to call initializeAttributeInheritance after binding to the DOM.
[vringar] You can put add_task(<task definition>).only(); on a mochitest to only have this test run
You can also use .skip() to skip tests you aren’t interested in
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,
Doug