More Kit, More Control – These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 203

[Katherine Patenio]

Hey firefox-dev,

Following Mike Conley's previous "These Weeks in Firefox" email (check it out if you haven't already!), here's the 203rd issue of our biweekly Firefox Desktop updates.

Thanks to Mike for helping me put these notes together. Stay tuned for Issue 204!

More Kit, More Control - These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 203

Highlights

• James enabled adaptive autofill in Nightly for testing, which we believe should provide better results in the URL bar when doing autocomplete!

• Jack updated the illustrations shown on some of our error pages to match the latest approved designs, giving users more polished artwork when the browser encounters connection or security errors!

• [screenshot]

• alt text: Internet connection error page with an adorable Kit illustration

• Controls for the Memories feature can now be set during Smart Window onboarding

• [screenshot]

• alt text: Two radio button controls for the Smart Window Memories feature, including "Chats in Smart Window" and "Browsing across Firefox"

• We’ve disabled the CSS filter implicitly applied to WebExtension pageAction SVG icons across all release channels starting in Firefox 152, completing the deprecation

• NOTE: The blog post published at WebExtensions API changes in Firefox 149-152 provides to extensions developers more details about this deprecation and links to the related MDN docs.

Friends of the Firefox team

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

Script to find new contributors from bug list

Volunteers that fixed more than one bug

• Amin Amir

• Pranjali Srivastava

• Sam Johnson

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

•  🌟:23rd: Regression: The new swipe-to-navigation indicator stucks for a moment, when deciding not to navigate the other page

• 🌟Akeem Omosanya: Remove commented-out code in SearchService.sys.mjs

• Amin Amir:

• 🌟Fix browsingContext.sys.mjs to assign to #contextCreatedHandled instead of contextCreatedHandled

• Fix missing WITHOUT ROWID SQLite performance optimization in SERPCategorization.sys.mjs

• 🌟Sahaj: Suggest the default target language for translation after changing the detected source language

• 🌟JIANG Zhirui: Breakpad build failed on Windows using VS2026 due to removal of stdext

•  John Iweh: Add "Open in New Tab" and "Open in New Container Tab" options to the context menu for Tabs from Other Devices

• Jak: Bookmarks and History - should respect the "When you open a link, image or media in a new tab, switch to it immediately" setting

• 🌟Andy [:rgbcmy]: Autoplayed next video should also be PIP

•  konyhéa: "Escape" key should collapse the expanded on hover sidebar launcher even if hover is still active.

•  Pranjali Srivastava:

• Remove icon property from sidebar extensions

• Show language-agnostic SelectTranslations context menu item when the source and target languages are the same

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

Addon Manager & about:addons

• Fixed long-standing regression on the autocomplete and datalist popups for extension inline options pages on about:addons (introduced in Firefox 68 by Bug 1532724, fix shipping in Firefox 152) - Bug 1595158

WebExtensions Framework

• Fixed access to web-accessible resources declared with <all_urls> from sandboxed documents (null-principal URLs), restoring extension redirects from the context-menu search flow, starting in Firefox 152 - Bug 2033905

WebExtension APIs

• Added exhaustive test coverage for tabs.move() against additional edge cases related to split-view tabs - Bug 2029092

DevTools

• Andreas Farre improved the Session History tab in the Application panel (still behind devtools.application.sessionHistory.enabled)

• added support for remote debugging (#2014064, #2016121)

• made sure that calls to History.replaceState are reflected in the UI (#2037359)

• Julian Descottes [:jdescottes] fixed the most frequent DevTools crash we were observing in Telemetry, adding a guard against IDBTransaction errors when retrieving breakpoints in the Debugger (#2030260)

• Nicolas Chevobbe [:nchevobbe] fixed the image preview tooltip for relative URLs images in constructed stylesheet (#2035503)

• Julian Descottes [:jdescottes] reduced the overhead we had because of network requests monitoring by only decoding response content when the user actually want to see the response (#2026228)

WebDriver

• Amin Amir cleaned up an incorrect variable assignment in our browsingContext module. 

• Logan Rosen updated stale references and broken links in our documentation about Marionette.

• Sameem improved the Marionette and WebDriver BiDi screenshot commands to enforce maximum allowed dimensions.

• Leo McArdle fixed the regression in the "log.entryAdded" event, which lacked an error message in the "text" field for the messages of type "error".

• Henrik Skupin fixed an issue in Marionette where WebDriver:Navigate and WebDriver:Refresh did not handle errors when the underlying navigation failed.

• Henrik Skupin improved geckodriver to detect an early Firefox exit during startup on Android, avoiding up to 60 seconds of unnecessary connection attempts.

• Henrik Skupin updated the geckodriver CI build job to produce a universal macOS binary supporting both x64 and aarch64.

Lint, Docs and Workflow

• Sylvestre ported some linters (e.g. file-whitespace, test-manifest-toml, license, file-perm, rejected-words & more) to Rust to help improve the runtime of the code review bot.

• Dale has been working on migration to moz-src for customkeys, dom/quota and odom/geolocation

• https://arewemozsrcyet.com/

New Tab Page

• We did our first region-specific trainhop on May 11th (just 15% of the US), and turned on HNT Nova (and sometimes Widgets) for those clients to get some advance-data of its behaviour in the wild! A note that HNT Nova gets turned on for everybody when Firefox 151 ships on May 19th.

• We’ll be launching a similar experiment in the DE, probably on May 12th, also at 15% population.

• Most of the team is heads down building out a sports-tracking widget, attempting to get that ready in time to be generally available for the upcoming World Cup event.

• Dre landed a new world clock widget, which is currently off by default, but pretty snazzy!

• [screenshot]

• alt text: World clock widget in New Tab featuring different time zones for YTO, BER, SYD, and LAX.

Search and Urlbar

• Nova (URL Bar Design Refresh)

• Drew and Daisuke continued their work on Nova styling for the Address bar (input and view).

• Search and Suggest

• Drew finalized two bugs for World Cup and sports suggestions, which were landed and uplifted: one to update the localization string for scheduled games and another to show both teams’ icons in suggestions. Drew also landed and uplifted a fix for rich search suggestion icons being forced into a square aspect ratio.

• Standard8 updated Ecosia favicons to the latest branding, including QA testing and publishing.

• Settings Redesign (SRD)

• Stephanie landed a test to ensure search suggestion settings are hidden when quicksuggest is disabled, as well as a patch to resolve TypeScript issues in search.mjs, and is adding test coverage to confirm removed search engines are not displayed in the default engines dropdown.

• General URL Bar and Component Updates

• Daisuke landed implementation of the context menu on URL bar results, and a fix to show the loading URL in the URL bar when starting up with a homepage.

• Marco is working on several tasks, including a PDF download / focus stealing issue and allowing arrays to be bound in Sqlite.sys.mjs. Marco also worked on fixes related to Places, such as avoiding replacing the favicons database if it is not corrupt.

• Standard8 finalized the URL bar test manifest split. Standard8 also upgraded us to TypeScript 6.

• Moritz landed a fix for URL bar abandonment telemetry being recorded when clicking an engine in the unified search button popup (Bug 2032973), which was also uplifted. Moritz also simplified search mode switcher item activation in tests, and made it so that the unified search button popup closes when installing an open search engine.

Smart Window

• natural language starting with tab close/undo 2035343 with expandable action log 2031508

• [screenshot]

• alt text: Tab close and undo actions in Smart Window accompanied by an expandable log of actions taken.

• assistant rendering feedback up/down 2032994 and markdown table 2027029

• nova styling blur 2027877 and suggestions 2026823

• accessibility screen reader 2028676 and keyboard focus 2037565

• optimize conversation starters extra requests 2030005 and caching 2033430

Storybook/Reusable Components/Acorn Design System

• Nova token updates occasionally, focused on SRD

UX Fundamentals

• Added support for the "SEC_ERROR_CA_CERT_INVALID" certificate error to the Felt Privacy error pages. - 2035942

Settings Redesign

• Settings redesign is being tested and will hopefully go out in Firefox 152!

Below the fold

• General triage

• Jared Hirsch, Sam Foster, Nick Grato, and Shane Hughes are the Firefox / Toolkit :: General triagers for the month of May!

• [mconley] Should have put this in General - but a reminder, if you get roped into a pwn2own thread or reviews, please prioritize them.

• [nicolas] The World's Hardest Hacking Competition - Pwn2Own Documentary (Part 1)

--

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