Firefox Headlines (July 18th, 2022)

[Katherine Patenio]

Greetings Firefox fans!

We'd like to share with you several updates that were announced during last week's Firefox Desktop meeting. See below for a summarized version of our meeting minutes.

Thanks to Niklas Baumgardner, Mike Conley, and Ed Lee for making these notes with me!

Highlights

• Dale Harvey implemented an experimental Quick Actions feature in the Address Bar

• [screenshot]
• Quick Actions such as "View Source" are available in the address bar when enabled

• Demo video: directly open privacy preferences, view source, take screenshot

• Enable browser.urlbar.quickactions.enabled and browser.urlbar.shortcuts.quickactions

• This is en-US only for now (Bug 1699316)

• CSS color-mix function support was added to developer tools via the layout.css.color-mix.enabled pref

• Display function in rule view autocomplete (Bug 1778396)

• Display color swatches for color-mix params (Bug 1695382)

• [screenshot]
• color-mix takes in two color values and mixes them by a given amount

• Thanks to evilpie, we now show entries for URLSearchParams instances in the console and debugger

• [screenshot]
• URLSearchParams can now be previewed when desired

• Thank you to m_kato who added a pip wrapper to support subtitles for Disney+!

• This is currently scheduled to go out in Firefox 104!

• The Search team has published a document about how adaptive autofill works in the AwesomeBar in Firefox. Lots of detail there on how that feature works, and various prefs for controlling it.

Friends of the Firefox team

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

Volunteers that fixed more than one bug

• Itiel 

• Michael Kohler [:mkohler] 

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

• 🌟 In the Firefox Profiler, first-time contributor Bhavya Joshi fixed github issue #4099 (see below for more information)

• Daniel Qeli fixed/improved alignment of "Learn more about performance" button with cache headers

• manekenpix removed defer usage in devtools\client\shared\test\helper_addons.js

• Raphaël Ferrand applied new classnames as you type in the .cls section of the rule-view

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions 

WebExtensions Framework

•  Extension CSP is now also applied to WebExtensions Workers - Bug 1685627 

Developer Tools   

• Raphael added an inactive notice when `border-image*` is used on internal table elements where `border-collapse` is set to `collapse` (Bug 1583910)

• Julian fixed an issue which was causing blank DevTools when debugging some WebExtension (Bug 1777296)

• Opening the Browser Console will no longer cause scripts to pause on `debugger` statements (Bug 1766128)

• Bomsy added a button to remove all breakpoints in the Debugger (Bug 1742774)

• [screenshot]
  
• Too many breakpoints? Clear them all with the click of a button.

• Alex is working on making the Debugger SourceTree code faster and easier to understand (see Bug 1777203 and blockers)

• The slow script warning toolbar was fixed and the “Debug” button will now be visible when you have DevTools opened, on all channel (Bug 1774937)

Picture-in-Picture

• Niklas has been working on fixes for the cc button on the PiP window

• Bug 1775334

• Bug 1778287

• mhowell updated the first time toggle description for the PiP toggle + made the toggle wider so that there are less lines of text (and less likelihood to visually overlap with other controls)

• mconley fixed an issue where the “Skip Ad” overlaps with PiP button

• janvi has been working on hover states for PiP, which will be landed soon!

Performance

• florian and hiro have been working together to reduce power consumption from a panels bug which causes Windows machines to composite at 60hz even after panels have closed.

Performance Tools (aka Firefox Profiler)

• Add a “Power Use” feature (Bug 1774844).
  From about:profiling it’s now possible to enable the “Power use” feature before starting the profiler:
  

  • [screenshot]
  • New feature inside about:profiling, named “Power Use”

  Then in Apple M1 and Windows 11 we can see the power usage during profiling:
  

  • [screenshot]
  • Inside the profiler, there are new tracks showing power usage, with a tooltip showing the instant power usage.

  This example comes from this profile: https://share.firefox.dev/3nNc2xS
  
  Take care to disable sampling with the “nostacksampling” option to have good measurements (soon a preset will be added to make it easier to make this work best (bug 1778282)).
  This is some huge work done by Florian Quèze.

• Add a pen icon to indicate profile names are editable (github issue #4099 by first-time contributor Bhavya Joshi 🎉🎆)
  

  • [screenshot]

• More label frames: bug 1749521, bug 1776721, bug 1777473. This exposes:

• more browser internals with understandable names to javascript developers (Style Computation, CSS Parsing, Layout tree destruction)

• Most javascript APIs implemented in C++ from: String, Object, TypedArray, Number, Date, Intl, RegExp, Map, Set, Reflect, JSON, BigInt, Array.

• This makes the profiler much more useful for JS developers.

• Fix the buffer size handling when reaching the configured maximum size. Previously we had a bug where the buffer size would always increase, eventually causing an OOM crash.

• LUL initialization on Linux has been optimised – but still more to come!

Search and Navigation

• James Teow has disabled the “Did you mean to go to <site>“ notification bar, which was quite annoying for users having a wildcarded DNS server, resolving any word to an helper page. It can be re-enabled setting `browser.urlbar.dnsResolveSingleWordsAfterSearch` to 1. Bug 1735534 

• Michael Kohler made the Remove button disabled for the default Search Engine, that can’t be removed anyway. Bug 1761513 

• Mandy Cheang is refactoring part of the Search Service to improve maintainability and robustness: Bug 1777278, Bug 1777599, Bug 1777632  

• Daisuke Akatsuka has corrected a regression where autofill could duplicate the protocol. Bug 1778335 

Below the fold

• General triage:

• Drew Willcoxon, Rob Helmer, Sam Foster, Stephanie Cunnane are this month’s triagers!

• [mconley] Andi-Bogdan Postelnicu from the CI / Quality Tools team is working on Linux-in-the-cloud development machines with shared sccache. With the VSCode Remote SSH extension installed, you can develop locally, build/test remotely. Soon with rr support! Currently staff only, and still under test and development. Interested in helping out? Contact Andi to get an account!

• [mconley] Automatic reminders in Bugzilla via whiteboard tag

• Adding this to the whiteboard: [reminder-TYPE YYYY-MM-DD] (e.g., [reminder-test 2022-07-13]), then on that date the tag will be removed and the bug assignee will get a needinfo referencing the comment where the tag was added.

• [florian] Using EventUtils.synthesizeNativeMouseEvent more than once can cause intermittent failures, as a second click could be transformed into a double click event.

• ESMification

• Services.jsm is no more! Importing it will now cause linting failures. It’s now a default global in privileged scopes.

• XPCOMUtils.jsm has been renamed to XPCOMUtils.sys.mjs

• See the most recent dev-platform post for the latest news

• There’s an #esmification Matrix room for questions and coordination

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,
kpatenio