A Tab Groups Scoop - These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 179
Katherine Patenio
Highlights
The WebExtensions team is fast-tracking support for “tab groups”-related updates to the tabs API (the updates have landed in Nightly 139 and been uplifted to Beta 138)
New Picture-in-Picture captions support was added to several sites including iq.com, rte.ie and joyn.de. Thanks to kernp25 and cmhernandezdev for their contributions!
The Profiles team is happy to report that the feature is currently in 138 beta with no open blockers from QA!
Next up, we plan to do a 0.5% rollout in the 138 release. We’re being extremely cautious because profiles are where user data is stored, and we need to get this right.
The WebExtensions team has introduced a new pref to allow developers to more easily test the add-on update flow from about:addons. Setting extensions.webextensions.prefer-update-over-install-for-existing-addon to true changes the behavior of the “Install Add-on From File…” menu item to use the update flow rather than the install flow for pre-existing add-ons (Bug 1956540)
Friends of the Firefox team
Introductions/Shout-Outs
Welcome to Joel Kelly who is joining the New Tab front-end team!
Resolved bugs (excluding employees)
Script to find new contributors from bug list
Volunteers that fixed more than one bug
Gautam Panakkal
Jason Jones
Kernp25
Ricardo Delgado Gomez
New contributors (🌟 = first patch)
🌟 Yakub Abdulrahman Alada: Bug 1917908 - Improve layout of the about:translations controls for small-width screens
Brian Ouyang: Bug 1948995 - Allow Full-Page Translations on moz-extension URLs
Cruz Hernandez: Bug 1958974 - Updated disneyplus PiP wrapper
Gautam Panakkal
Bug 1640117 - update console warnings to state 'enhanced tracking protection' instead of 'content blocking'
Bug 1860037 - Split up and clean up browser/extensions/formautofill/test/browser/creditCard/browser_creditCard_telemetry.js
Bug 1955584 - Set right margin equal to top/bottom margin on vertical tab close buttons
🌟 Isaac Briandt: Bug 1944944 - Update code to align with A11y Audit for Full-Page ARIA Attribute Translations
🌟 Jason Jones
Bug 1176600 - Remove defunct pref listed in m-c prefs/all.js
Bug 1689254 - Lazily initialize zoom UI
Bug 1855787 - Persist translation panel intro until first translation is complete
Bug 1956009 - Remove browser/base/content/test/zoom/browser_default_zoom_multitab_002.js
joel.mozillaosi: Bug 1953387 - [devtools] Display empty string for undefined/NaN in netmonitor time columns
keanucuco: Bug 1855839 - [Translations] Refresh offline translation language list via TranslationsView observer
Abdelaziz Mokhnache: Bug 1957554 - add sort predicate for path column
🌟 Ricardo Delgado Gomez
Bug 1815793 - Display error when failing to load supported languages
Bug 1952132 - Add a border-radius to new-tab broken-image tiles, for consistency with other tiles
🌟 Sangie[:sangie50]: Bug 1958324 - Rephrase history clearing to not include search in sanitize dialog
Shane Ziegler: Bug 1957495 - Move ToolbarIconColor helper object from `browser.js` into its own module `browser/themes/ToolbarIconColor.sys.mjs`
🌟 Raksha Kumari: Bug 1947278 - Replace div with moz-card in Button Group story for emphasis
Project Updates
Add-ons / Web Extensions
WebExtension APIs
Localized string using the i18n WebExtensions API will cascade through locale subtags to find translations before falling back to the extension's default language (Bug 1381580
Thanks to Carlos for contributing this enhancement to the i18n API 🎉
A new text-to-audio task type has been added to the trialML API to allow extensions to use the Xenova/speecht5_tts model for text to speech tasks (Bug 1959146).
DevTools
Abdelaziz Mokhnache made the new Netmonitor path column sortable (#1957554)
Joel fixed duration of incomplete requests in Netmonitor, will no longer show "0 mn" (#1953387)
Holger Benl made editing logpoint/breakpoint condition actually taken into account (#1944500)
Alexandre Poirot [:ochameau] fixed an issue where pausing in the Debugger wouldn't scroll the paused location into view (#1953394)
Hubert Boma Manilla (:bomsy) updated links to MDN as some pages were moved (#1953851)
Nicolas Chevobbe fixed an issue where editing input in markup view could lose focus (#1955040)
WebDriver BiDi
Thanks to Dan who improved an internal helper to stop returning closed Browsing Contexts.
To support the installation of unsigned web extensions, the WebDriver BiDi command webExtension.install has been updated to install extensions temporarily by default. A permanent installation is still possible by setting the vendor-prefixed parameter moz:permanent to true.
EventUtils has been updated to support an asyncEnabled flag on the aEvent argument across all method variants that synthesize wheel scroll events for DOMWindowUtils. This enables sending asynchronous "widget" events, which will soon be used by Marionette and WebDriver BiDi to dispatch events through APZ in the parent process.S
asha added an API to BrowsingContext class to override the geolocation coordinates and new "emulation.setGeolocationOverride" WebDriver BiDi command, which utilizes the new BrowsingContext method under the hood.
The webdriver crate version 0.52.0, as shipped with geckodriver 0.36.0, didn’t allow direct consumers of this crate to construct a NewSessionParameters type. This has been fixed in the newly released version 0.53.0.
Lint, Docs and Workflow
jdescottes fixed our ESLint ignores where the paths contain target (we were excluding too much).
Standard8 fixed the no-browser-refs-in-toolkit rule to handle moz-src:
New Tab Page
We’re on track to perform our first train-hop experiment next month. We’ll be train-hopping a newer revision of the New Tab code to 138 release. That revision of the New Tab code will only have one change - a version increase.
Due to how the Taskcluster configs and Ship It tool currently work, the train-hopping New Tab code is currently hosted on GitHub, but we should be able to keep everything in mozilla-central when this bug is fixed
Nathan fixed a bug where custom wallpapers were being reset after restart
Scott fixed a bug where the text colour of the page would be incorrect with custom wallpapers when the personalization panel was opened
Nathan fixed some visual issues when displaying publisher favicons
You can test publisher favicons by setting browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.discoverystream.publisherFavicon.enabled to true
Special thanks to Ricardo Delgado Gomez, who fixed a visual glitch in our cards when images fail to load!
mconley has patches up to pull in strings from firefox-l10n when building newtab as an XPI
pdahiya has some WIP patches for runtime Glean metric and ping registration
Maxx has a patch up for an experiment to remind users of our Firefox mobile applications on the New Tab page
Reem has been refining and adding tests for reporting content on the New Tab page that people aren’t interested in
Picture-in-Picture
Thanks to kernp25 for several PiP wrapper fixes and additions:
Thanks to cmhernandezdev for fixing our Disney+ wrapper
Performance Tools (aka Firefox Profiler)
Profiling xpcshell tests locally just became easier, ./mach test <path to xpcshell test> -–profiler will open a profile of the test at the end.
Profile Management
139 is a catchup / blocker uplift / bugfix release. Main focus is making the cross-profile shared database and cross-instance notifier code independent of the profiles feature, to support Nimbus and OMC storing cross-profile data there even if the profiles feature isn't enabled (metabug 1953861).
Recently fixed bugs:
Jared fixed bug 1957924, ensuring the profile group ID gets correctly set across a profile group if a user disables, then re-enables data collection
Jared fixed bug 1958196, fixing visibility issues in profiles using the System Theme after an OS theme change
Niklas fixed bug 1956111, App menu back button hover coloring is incorrect in HCM
Teddy fixed bug 1941576, Profile manager: Subcopy missing from "Open" checkbox
Teddy fixed bug 1956350, Limit theme chip labels to one truncated line
Sammy fixed bug 1957767, When account is disconnected, cannot log back into profile
Search and Navigation
Dao fixed the toolbar context menu being shown on address bar results @ 1957448
Drew fixed several bugs relating to sponsored suggestions @ 1955360 + 1955257 + 1958038 + 1958421
James has been fixing TypeScript definitions across multiple files @ 1958104 + 1958102 + 1958640
Moritz implemented a patch to reset Search settings when they are corrupt instead of just failing @ 1945178
Daisuke fixed the unified search button being persisted incorrectly @ 1957630
Moritz fixed quick actions not being shown after tab switch @ 1958878
Storybook/Reusable Components/Acorn Design System
Jules created a new color palette and all of the colors are now available in the design tokens (not just the ones that are being used already 🎉)
You can check out the Colors section of the Tokens Table in Storybook
Grays were not updated in this, that is being done in another bug
We’re playing with the idea of being called the “Acorn Engineering”/”Design System Engineering” team so if you see that it’s still recomp :)
Below the fold
General triage
[mconley] See this thread from Gijs on recent changes and cleanups in BrowserGlue
[Nicolas] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/URI/Reference/Fragment/Text_fragments
Also note that we’re really just synthesising and humanising 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,