WebExtensions Mv3, WebMIDI, OpenSearch, PiP updates and more! - These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 128

[Katherine Patenio]

Greetings Firefox fans,

Here are the highlights from this week's meeting with the Firefox Desktop engineering team. Special thanks to niklas and mconley for their help with summarizing all updates below.

Happy reading!

Highlights

• Initial WebExtension Manifest Version 3 support is riding the 109 release train

• For more information, please read this blog post

• Again, a reminder that Mozilla plans to continue support for the Manifest Version 2 blocking WebRequest API (this API powers, for example, uBlock Origin) while simultaneously supporting Manifest Version 3.

• Have a Manifest Version 2 WebExtension that you want to migrate? Here’s our migration guide!

• We’re making it possible for users to use WebMIDI on sites that they grant permission to. See “Intent to ship: Add-On-Gated WebMIDI” email for details on how this works.

• Hanna landed an initial implementation of a site specific search feature that appears as a URL bar result. This works as long as the currently selected tab supports OpenSearch. Wikipedia is a good example site.

• You can test this by setting `browser.urlbar.contextualSearch.enabled` to `true` in about:config

• [Screenshot]
• Alt text: Image of an opensearch result appearing on Firefox's URL bar.

• Thanks to Niklas for adding a playback scrubber to Picture-in-Picture!

• It is still a work-in-progress feature as a part of our effort to improve PiP playback controls. But to check it out in its current state, enable the pref `media.videocontrols.picture-in-picture.improved-video-controls.enabled` and then open a video in PiP to see it.

• [Screenshot]
• Alt text: Image of a Picture-in-Picture window with playback controls displayed, including a brand new video scrubber.

Friends of the Firefox team

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

Script to find new contributors from bug list

Volunteers that fixed more than one bug

• Brian Pham 

• Itiel 

• Sebastian Zartner [:sebo]

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

• Brian Pham removed message recommending closing the original browser before migrating and removed the browser.migrate.showBookmarksToolbarAfterMigration pref

• Karntino Areros removed image opacity attribute and changed the color of the watchpoint buttons when object inspector property is highlighted

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

WebExtensions Framework

• As part of the work related to “Origin Controls “ and “Unified Extensions UI”:

• The Unified Extensions UI is also riding the 109 release train - Bug 1801129

• Follow-ups and bug fixes

• Fixed a regression that was preventing the “disabled” state of an extension action to be applied correctly. This bug was also affecting Beta (108) - Bug 1802411

• Extensions actions can now be pinned/unpinned from the Unified Extensions panel - Bug 1782203

• Default area of extension actions is now the unified extensions panel - Bug 1799947

• Niklas fixed a regression on opening a link from the context menu options on an extension sidebar page (regressed in Firefox 107 by Bug 1790855), the fix has been landed in nightly 109 and uplifted to beta 108 - Bug 1801360

• Emilio fixed a regression related to the windows.screen properties in extension background pages returning physical screen dimensions (regressed in Firefox 103 by Bug 1773813) - Bug 1798213

WebExtension APIs

• As part of the ongoing work on the declarativeNetRequest API: the initial implementation of the declarativeNetRequest rule engine is being hooked to the networking (and so rules with actions and conditions already supported are now being applied to actual intercepted network requests) - Bug 1745761

Addon Manager & about:addons

• SitePermsAddonProvider: a new Add-ons Manager provider used to provision virtual add-ons which unlock dangerous permissions for specific sites. We are experimenting with using an add-on install flow to gate site access to WebMIDI in order to convey to users that granting such access entails trusting the site.

• Initial implementation from Bug 1778959

• Enabled in Nightly 108 by default in Bug 1790620

• Other related follow-ups

• Fixes from nightly 109 uplifted to beta 108: Bug 1801199, Bug 1801337, Bug 1800576 

• Bug tracking enabling the new provider in all channels: Bug 1790621

• Bugs tracking new in-tree docs to be added: Bug 1742518 

• Tracking meta: Bug 1737161

• Thanks to nchevobbe for working with us on the new design of the “sitepermission” addon type

Developer Tools

DevTools

• Zac Svoboda tweaked the JSON viewer so the toolbar matches the one of the toolbox  (bug)  

• Karntino Areros made watchpoint more legible (bug)

• Clinton Adeleke fixed padding in the debugger “welcome box” (bug)

• Sean Feng made a change so opening DevTools does not trigger PerformanceObserver callback (bug)

• Julian fixed adding new rules in inspector on pages with CSP (bug)

WebDriver BiDi

• Opening a new tab with WebDriver:NewWindow now properly sets the focus on the page (bug)

• Column numbers in expectations and stacktraces are now 0-based (bug)

ESMification status

• Please consider migrating your components if you haven't already. Don't forget actors as well.

• ESMified status:

• browser: 39.7%

• toolkit: 29.8%

• Total: 41.3% (up from 38.4%)

• #esmification on Matrix

• Migration Document (with a walkthrough!)

Lint, Docs and Workflow

• Many thanks to :trickypr who finished the work to switch from ESLint deprecated jsdoc rules to eslint-plugin-jsdoc.

• Next steps are to centralise the configuration to make it easier to roll out to more locations.

• We now have our build-dependent ESLint rules running on CI.

• Documentation is on source docs.

• It runs once a day (UTC midnight), and is tier-2.

• Sheriffs will file bugs if it starts failing, and issues are expected to be fixed within a couple of business days.

• It runs two additional rules:

• valid-ci-uses

• valid-services-property

Migration Improvements (CalState LA Project)

• Brian Pham got rid of an outdated message in the wizard that recommended closing the original browser before doing a migration

• Marco is working on a fix for our SQLite integration which we believe will help Alvin Lew import favicons from Safari  

• mconley is working on landing infrastructure for a new migration wizard shared component and starting to improve documentation

Picture-in-Picture

• kpatenio fixed an issue where the PiP toggle and native video controls overlapped visually

• Janvi enhanced PiP control tooltips - now tooltips appear on mouse hover and on keyboard focus

Performance Tools (aka Firefox Profiler)

• Clicking a node in the activity graph selects the call tree tab now. (PR #4331)
  

  • [Screenshot]
  • Alt text: A gif showing the new clicking behavior on the activity graph for Firefox Profiler.

• Added markers for browsertime visual metrics. (PR #4330) (Example profile)
  

  • [Screenshot]
  • Alt text: Image of Firefox Profiler showing off new markers for browsertime visual metrics.

• Improved the vertical scrolling of our treeviews like call tree, marker table panels. (PR #4332)

• Added a profiler marker for FirstContentfulPaint metric. (Bug 1691820) (Example profile)
  

  • [Screenshot]
  • Alt text: Image of the Firefox Profiler showing an added marker for a metric named FirstContentfulPaint.

Search and Navigation

• adw fixed two intermittent test failures related to Quick Suggest:

• one related to Quick Suggest telemetry

• another related to the client timing out waiting for a response from Merino

• Dão landed a patch that implements a placeholder URL bar result menu button and popup

• standard8 landed a series of patches so that now some of our search test utility functions take an options object as an argument. This allows consumers to automatically set an installed search engine as the default.

• adw landed a patch that adds weather suggestions to Quick Suggest. This is part of a larger project that Drew and Mandy are working on to add weather suggestions to the URL bar. 

• adw also fixed 2 bugs related to mistakenly recording telemetry for Quick Suggest results that weren’t actually visible to the user:

• 1800184

• 1800810

• Daisuke fixed a bug where we were sending a search term to the user’s default search engine instead of navigating to the result they clicked on in the URL bar results pane.

• Dale added code that filters out navigational Top Pick suggestions when they duplicate the heuristic result in the URL bar results pane.

• Neil fixed a regression where the URL text highlighting wasn’t being persisted when the user clicked away from the current tab and back again.

• adw landed a patch that makes Merino data collection for Quick Suggest opt out in Firefox Beta. There had been a long-running experiment doing the same thing.

• standard8 landed a patch that replaces calls to Cu.reportError with calls to the more standard console.error within the Search component’s code.

Below the fold

• General triage:

• Drew, Molly, Sam and DJ are this month’s triagers!

• mkaply, jhirsh, Neil, and Johnathan Sudiaman will triage starting December

• [mconley] Want to beef up your team's documentation, like this example? Great idea!

• Tips:

• Start by adding the require-jsdoc / valid-jsdoc configurations to your component areas

• Then add your directory to this list to get it emitted via SphinxJS

• Then you can embed that into your documentation like this

• [mconley] You can generate a profile from mochitests by using `--env MOZ_PROFILER_STARTUP=1` with `./mach try`. 

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