Extensions UI Improvements and More - These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 191

[Katherine Patenio]

Hello everyone,

We're back with another batch of Firefox engineering updates. Check them out below!

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Highlights

• As part of improvements to the extensions panel, an empty state UI has been introduced to help users to understand why their installed extensions may not be listed in the panel (e.g. when opening a private browsing window or enabling permanent private browsing mode).

• [screenshot 1]

• caption: Empty state shown when no extensions are currently installed.

• alt text: The Firefox Extensions UI panel encouraging users to find more extensions.

• [screenshot 2]

• caption: Empty state shown when extensions are already installed but not allowed to access private browsing tabs.

• alt text: The Firefox Extensions panel UI explaining why no extensions are displayed in private browsing mode.

• The checkbox for allowing extensions to run in private browsing windows is going to be enabled by default when installing an extension with permanent private browsing mode enabled.

• Thanks to Pier Angelo Vendrame from the Tor project for this enhancement.

• [screenshot]
  

• alt text: A Firefox extension popup during the installation process with a checkbox enabled for the option "Allow extension to run in private windows"

• Daisuke improved keyboard support for the Unified Search button in the Address Bar, allowing it to open using Enter, Space or Down.

Friends of the Firefox team

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

Volunteers that fixed more than one bug

• Khalid AlHaddad

• Kyler Riggs [:kylr]

• Michael van Straten [:michael]

• Pier Angelo Vendrame

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

• Mag Mukendi:

• 🌟Console.log() is capitalizing 'l' characters in a url string

• Khalid AlHaddad:

• [wdspec] Cookie tests for WebDriver classic can leave set cookies behind causing failures in later tests

• [wdspec] Rename "add_cookie" fixture to "add_document_cookie"

• PhuongNam:

• 🌟about:about doesn't list about:firefoxview

• Kyler Riggs [:kylr]:

• 🌟 "Turn on Vertical Tabs" option should be present in tab strip context menus invoked from draggable spaces

• Menu Bar context menu has an extra divider

• Jim Gong:

• Clear sessionStorage in browsingData.remove() for parity with "Clear Cookies and Site Data"

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

Addon Manager & about:addons

• In addition to the new empty state UI, users without add-ons will be introduced to extensions instead. - Bug 1982225 / Bug 1992179 / Bug 1778684 / Bug 1814871 (along with Bug 1994180 that will be following up with a tweak to a couple of the localized strings).

WebExtension APIs

• Thanks to the enhancement contributed by Jim Gong, starting from Firefox 146 the browsingData.remove API will also allow extensions to clear the sessionStorage WebAPI data - Bug 1886894

• Valentin Gosu introduced masque proxy support to the WebExtensions proxy API in Firefox 145 - Bug 1988988

• Investigated and fixed a crash triggered by storing deeply nested JSON data in the storage.sync WebExtensions API backend (introduced in Firefox 135 as a side-effect of changes introduced on the storage.sync backend side by Bug 1888472), fix landed in Firefox 145 and has been uplifted to Firefox 144 beta, Firefox 143.0.3 release and Firefox ESR 140.0.3 - Bug 1989840

• Landed new Glean probe to assess real world impact of the storage.local API IndexedDB corruption issues of the underlying sqlite3 data store (investigated as part of Bug 1979997 and Bug 1885297)

• NOTE: a new hidden boolean about:config pref extensions.webextensions.keepStorageOnCorrupted.storageLocal which does automatically reset the storage.local IndexedDB database when the Bug 1979997 corruption database issue is detected, and prevents browser.storage.local.clear API calls from failing when Bug 1885297 corrupted key is being hit.

• NOTE: We intent to keep the auto-reset behaviors disabled by default for a few more nightly cycles to review the new telemetry before enabling the auto-reset behaviors on all channels (follow up tracked by Bug 1992973)

DevTools

• Mag Mukendi removed the italic font style on links in the Console (#1982207)

• Alexandre Poirot [:ochameau] added automatic pretty print for minified code in the Debugger  (#1917012)

• Julian Descottes [:jdescottes] fixed an issue that was preventing to set event listener breakpoints in the Debugger (#1992769)

• Nicolas Chevobbe [:nchevobbe] recovered a performance regression in the Inspector (#1991119)

• Alexandre Poirot [:ochameau] fixed a couple leaks in DevTools (#1993262)

Lint, Docs and Workflow

• ESLint

• The ESLint rule no-case-declarations has now been rolled out everywhere (reduces warnings from ~850 -> ~450)

• StyleLint

• New rules added for font-size and font-weight tokens.

Search and Navigation

• Address Bar

• Drew enabled Important Dates feature in Germany, France and Italy for English locales. Bug 1992811 

• Dale made the new redesigned Identity panel show the expected icon for local files. Bug 1989844 

• Dharma landed new search onboarding strings to be used in Nimbus experiments. Bug 1982132 

• Places

• Marco has fixed a TopCrash related to fetching favicons affecting Firefox 143, fix is in Firefox 144

• Emilio fixed cases where bookmarks favicons were not painted in menus.

• Search

• Pier Angelo Vendrame fixed origin attribute use for OpenSearch and engine icons. Bug 1987600, Bug 1993166 

• Florian optimized searchconfig xpcshell tests to use a lot less cpu time. Bug 1991615

Below the fold

General triage

• Stephen Thompson, Rebecca King, Anna Kulyk, and Christina Lin are this month’s Firefox / Toolkit :: General triagers!

This week I learned

[nicolas] In you case you did not know, there’s a convenient way to replace a Node’s children using replaceChildren: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/replaceChildren

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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,

kpatenio