High Profile Improvements - a Belated These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 176

[Mike Conley]

Hello firefox-dev,

About a month ago, various members of the Firefox Desktop engineering team got together to compare notes on the various goings on in the codebase. We've taken the liberty of reforming the notes from that meeting and making them into something a little more palatable. I realize these are a tad late, but things have been busy! Expect a flurry of Issues over the next few days as we catch up!

Thanks to Niklas Baumgardner who put these notes together with me.

Highlights

• Multiple profiles are now enabled by default in Nightly!

• Preffed on in Nightly only - upcoming 0.5% rollout in Beta and Release will be done via Nimbus

• File bugs against Toolkit :: Startup and Profile System

• For WebExtension authors, failed downloads with a NETWORK_FAILED error can now be resumed through the downloads WebExtensions API - Bug 1694049

• Thanks to kernp25 for contributing a fix for this longstanding bug 🎉

• Alexandre Poirot has enabled Service Worker debugging by default in the Firefox DevTools debugger

• Moritz fixed a bug where users switching between Fx versions using the same profile were unable to search and saw broken context menus. This affected a small number of users in release, and so his patch landed in a dot release.

Friends of the Firefox team

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

Volunteers that fixed more than one bug

• kernp25

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

• 🌟 Arkadiy Tetelman added a patch to avoid skipping domains in DNR requestDomains/initiatorDomains

• Spencer renamed 'action' params in Actions.sys.mjs to avoid conflict with 'action' module

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

WebExtensions Framework

• Tabs that have been redirected to a moz-extension urls (e.g. through webRequest or DNR) can now be reloaded or navigated back successfully to the moz-extension urls in the tab history - Bug 1826867

WebExtension APIs

• Starting from Firefox 136 menus.update and menus.remove API methods will return a rejected promise instead of ignoring non-existing menus - Bug 1688743

• Fixed bug in DNR `initiatorDomains` and `requestDomains` conditions - Bug 1939981

• Thanks to Arkadiy Tetelman for reporting and contributing a fix for this bug 🎉

DevTools

• Alexandre Poirot worked on several fixes for webextensions debugging:

• Fixed a regression where webextensions creating iframes would lead to blank devtools (#1941006)

• Fixed a bug where content scripts could appear duplicated in the source tree, and would also result in awkward behavior when pausing / stepping (#1941681)

• Improved the handling of messages logged from content scripts to avoid duplicated log entries (#1941418)

• Show manifest error when reloading an addon from DevTools (#1940079)

• [Screenshot]

• Caption: An error message appearing in the debugger for a WebExtension when the manifest cannot be loaded. The error reads: "Unable to reload: JSON.parse: expected double-quoted property name at line 3 column 3 of the JSON data from: server0.conn1.webExtensionDescriptor13 (resource://gre/modules/Extension.sys.mjs: 1176:26)"

• Nicolas Chevobbe fixed a few accessibility and High Contrast mode issues:

• Fixed the color of the close button used in sourcemap warnings to be correct in dark mode (#1942227)

• Updated the netmonitor status codes to be visible in High Contrast mode (#1940749)

• Nicolas Chevobbe also made several improvements to autocompletes in DevTools:

• The CSS autocomplete will now provide suggestions for variables when used inside calc, for instance in width: calc(var(-- (#1444772)

• The autocomplete in the inspector search is now handling correctly classnames containing numbers and special characters (#1220387)

• Nicolas Chevobbe addressed a long standing issue in the JSON viewer which would always display values after parsing them via JS, which could result in approximate values for big numbers or high precision decimals. The source is now always displayed, and we also show the JS parsed value next to it when relevant. (#1431808)

• [Screenshot]

• Caption: The JSON Viewer developer tool showing two very large numeric values. They are shown exactly as they're defined in the JSON, and then right next to them is an indicator displaying the numeric value that they were parsed to.

• Julian Descottes fixed a bug with the Debugger local script override which might incorrectly show scripts as being overridden if another DevTools Toolbox previously added an override (#1940998)

• Julian Descottes addressed a regression which would lead to blank devtools if any iframe on the page was showing an XML document with an invalid XSLT (#1934520)

• Julian Descottes fixed an issue with the Debugger pretty printing feature, which could fail if the file contained windows-style line-breaks (#1932023)

• Julian Descottes finalized an old patch to show details about the throttling profiles you can select in the network monitor and RDM (#1770932)

• [Screenshot]

• Caption: The throttling menu for the Network Monitor developer tools is displayed, with each menu item indicating the approximate download and upload speed, as well as an indication of latency.

For example: "GPRS (↓ 50Kbps ↑ 20Kbps ⏲ 500ms)"

• Hubert Boma Manilla fixed a recent regression with the preview popup in the debugger which would not show the value of the hovered token (#1941269)

• Hubert Boma Manilla improved the edit and resend feature in the netmonitor to properly set the security flags for the resent requests and avoid bugs for instance with requests using CORS (#1883380)

WebDriver BiDi

• Spencer Poor (:speneth) fixed all the linter warnings in Actions.sys.mjs.

• Henrik Skupin fixed an issue when another Firefox instance is using the Remote Agent and hasn’t shut down properly, a new test starting Firefox on the same WebSocket port will trigger a 5-second wait for the port to free up. If it remains unavailable, Firefox will shut down.

Lint, Docs and Workflow

• Gijs enabled the eslint-plugin-promise rule for valid-params which checks for functions on Promise being called with the correct amount of arguments.

• This will protect against cases such as foo.catch() which looks like it should do something, but doesn't.

• Standard8 added a linter for checking that we don't include package names in unpublished package.json files.

New Tab Page

• The New Tab layout update has rolled out to 100% of our US population! We’re aiming to do the rest of the world soon.

Search and Navigation

• Address Bar

• Mandy fixed a bug so that we now correctly handle a question mark appearing at the end of a search string (1648956)

• James landed a patch related to urlbar interaction tracking that ends all interactions after one hour of inactivity (1936956)

• Emilio fixed a bug where, when Firefox Translations was used for a page, the address bar wasn’t showing what language the page had been translated to (1938121)

• Marco fixed a bug where the search open tabs feature wasn’t finding tabs where the page had loaded with a 4xx or 5xx server status error (1939597)

• Scotch Bonnet

• Yazan fixed an issue where search mode was defaulting to Google after the browser was restarted (1925235)

• Daisuke fixed an issue where screenreaders were failing to narrate secondary actions buttons when in actions mode (1929515)

• Daisuke also fixed an issue related to using ctrl+shift+tab to navigate to the previous tab (1933243)

• Daisuke fixed an issue where the unified search button dropdown wasn’t being dismissed when a new tab was opened using ctrl+T (1936545)

• Marco enabled the not secure label for http for Release 136 (1937136)

• Dale fixed an issue so that the search keyword is retained for contextual search mode when the engine is autofilled (1938036)

• Daisuke landed a patch so that contextual search works with multiple-word searches (1938040)

• Moritz fixed a bug where the unified search button icon wasn’t being refreshed correctly in private browsing windows (1938567)

• Firefox Suggest

• Drew landed a significant number of telemetry-related patches (1940808, 1941100, 1941161, 1941690, 1941692, 1941694, 1941988, 1941989)

Storybook/Reusable Components

• Hanna created the moz-input-text component Storybook

• Tim created the moz-input-search component (more changes to come) Storybook

• Anna added documentation for moz-button Storybook

• Jules added support for description and support-page to the moz-radio-group (for the group itself, it was already there for individual radios) Storybook

• Hanna added the moz-box-button component that will be used in the Settings redesign and some other settings throughout Firefox Storybook

Below the fold

• General triage:

• mconley, mcrawford and negin are this month’s Firefox / Toolkit :: General triagers!

• mconley is going to be moving most of browser/components/newtab to browser/extensions/newtab soon as part of an effort to repackage New Tab as a built-in addon

• Hoping to do this at the top of the next Nightly cycle

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 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,

-Mike