Short but Sweet - These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 137
Niklas Baumgardner
aminomancer and Negin from the OMC team are making it possible to embed the new migration wizard nicely in about:welcome! This metabug tracks that effort.
bnasar added support for a new keyboard shortcut to toggle PiP fullscreen mode
You can now press the “f” key or double click the PiP window to toggle fullscreen mode
At long last, after much experimentation, the about:home startup cache is being (cautiously) rolled out to users on the release channel! The about:home startup cache improves the loading time of about:home on browser start. If all goes well, we expect (almost) all users to have the cache enabled by default in Firefox 113. We may continue to do a few holdback studies just to double-check the performance of the cache in the wild.
Friends of the Firefox team
Resolved bugs (excluding employees)
Volunteers that fixed more than one bug
Itiel
Mathew Hodson
portiawuu
Victoria Ajala
New contributors (🌟 = first patch)
Anwar Sadat Ayub made destroy method of MessageHandler modules optional
Brian Pham wrote a test that ensures that if there are no browser profile migrators available, the new Migration Wizard is sent to the NO_BROWSERS_FOUND page
Lata converted Troubleshoot.jsm to use ChromeUtils.requestProcInfo over Services.ppmm to get process types
Noah Osuolale updated IdentityCredentialStorageCleaner to only run if FedCM is enabled
Abhishek added a getDatabaseValue helper to PlacesTestUtils
Victoria Ajala updated Session Store to use normal console logging instead of debug(), added unwritable margin print settings, and added a Module base class for WebDriver BiDi
Project Updates
Add-ons / Web Extensions
WebExtensions Framework
As part of the ongoing work related to better WebExtensions support on GeckoView:
We have introduced a new ExtensionProcessCrashObserver singleton, which is watching the extension process creation/selection and shutdown observer server topics and notify the WebExtensions and GeckoView internals when the Extension child process dies (Bug 1827665)
Introduced support for an optional browser_specific_settings.gecko_android to allow extension developers to optionally provide a different compatibility version range for GeckoView-based browsers (Bug 1824237)
As part of the work on the Extension button panel, a few more issues have been tracked down and fixed (Bug 1828966 fixed “Pin to Toolbar” context menu item getting out of sync, Bug 1801266 fixed the extension widget behaviors when the extension action button is pinned in a non visible area, Bug 1827034 to hide the extension button in popup window's toolbar)
Relaxed web_accessible_resources schema requirements to reduce changes needed on the manifest.json file while porting MV3 extensions from Google Chrome (Bug 1828128)
WebExtension APIs
As part of the ongoing work related to the declarativeNetRequest WebExtensions API, a number of fixes have been worked on and landed (Bug 1826383, Bug 1825947, Bug 1826460, Bug 1825824, Bug 1826651, Bug 1829404), introduced telemetry probe to track its behavior in the wild (Bug 1803363, Bug 1826813) and turned it on by default for the extension developers to start experimenting with the new API (Bug 1782685)
Developer Tools
DevTools
Contributions from other teams:
From Emilio: Bug 1827850 - Can't break on DOM mutations on UA widgets.
From Jamie: Bug 1572512 - Many implicit and explicit ARIA roles are not recognized
In preparation for enabling the Inspector Rules view compatibility widget, Nicolas is fixing performance issues (bug, bug).
Nicolas made further enhancements to pretty printing (bug).
Nicolas also fixed folder name issues in the Debugger sourceview (bug).
Alex improved the Debugger cleanup logic when a thread is removed (bug, bug and bug).
Alex fixed an annoying behavior with sourcemaps in the debugger, where we would always force selecting the original source on pause (bug).
Alex also fixed a regression where some sourcemapped files could not be opened in the Debugger (bug).
WebDriver BiDi
Sasha added support for "channels" to our script.callFunction and script.addPreloadScript commands. This allows clients to create custom events (eg DOM Mutations) (bug).
Sasha also updated our serialization to match the latest spec updates. This gives better control for objects and DOM nodes serialization (bug).
Thanks to Jamie for also fixing Marionette's getComputedRole to return ARIA roles (bug).
ESMification status
Progress has levelled-off a little, but some bigger patches are in the pipeline.
Converting modules used in workers is waiting on ES module workers to ship (probably shipping in 114).
ESMified status:
browser: 63%
toolkit: 78%
Total: 75.5% (up from 74.6%)
#esmification on Matrix
Migration Document (with a walkthrough!)
Lint, Docs and Workflow
Queuing up patches for enabling of Prettier on JSON files, maybe landing at the start of next week after the merges.
Upgrading of Prettier and enabling on xhtml/html files will hopefully happen mid-115 cycle.
Migration Improvements (CalState LA Project)
We had our last meeting with the students on Friday. There are a few projects that are more likely to slip to 115 than land in 114 (credit card migration, the DuckDuckGo migrator, some legacy Microsoft browser importing improvements). Thank you so much to all of our students this semester!
Alvin Lew
Angel Villalobos
Ani Movsesian
Brian Pham
Bryan Macoy
Evan Liang
Nolan Ishii
Portia Wu
Steven Wang
Zachariah Harris
Also thank you to Dr. Chengyu Sun, who is running the course
Portia fixed the browser / profile selector so that the dropdown list can be scrolled when it is long, and also tightened up some of our styling
Steven has a patch up to add support for importing autofill entries from Chrome-based browsers
Picture-in-Picture
bnasar made sure PiP controls don’t disappear when hovering over a control item
mhowell made the origin document marked as activated whenever a PiP window is opened to address issues with autoplay
mhowell restored rule to make PiP first-time toggle disappear after 3 seconds
dwalker recently landed a patch that allows support for hidden WebVTT tracks, if set in PiP overrides.
First site to be supported is ted.com
Search and Navigation
Dão fixed the address bar height to scale with the OS text size.
Marco fixed an issue with the alternative frecency threshold.
James and Stephanie have continued work on the search engine result page telemetry with lots of progress made.
Storybook/Reusable Components
Thanks to Jules for working through making toolkit our source of truth for CSS token values/variables!
This allows our reusable widgets to use shared CSS regardless if the widget is in the chrome or in-content
hjones landed some work that shows a component readiness status in Storybook now.
Below the fold
General triage:
Luca, jhirsch, dwalker and sfoster are this month’s Firefox / Toolkit :: General triagers!
We need people to sign-up for this - please slot your name in!
[mconley] try / our hg infrastructure have been having a few bad days. Our excellent vcs / infra people are working on it, but I think we can expect some tree closures and rate limiting as we need to prioritize for the RC (release candidate) builds for the release next week.
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,
Niklas