Mike Conley
Switch to Container Tabs - These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 157
Highlights
After fixing some bugs discovered in Nightly, Marco has enabled cross-container tab search on beta and release. This should go out with Firefox 125!
Caption: The Firefox URL bar is open with the characters "stea" entered. One of the suggestions is for an Amazon page for the Steam Deck console, which is opened in a Shopping container tab. A "Switch to Tab - Shopping" item is displayed next to the search result.
Daisuke fixed a 22-year old bug and we now prevent passwords in URLs from being saved in history!
DevTools are getting faster! Nicolas Chevobbe improved Style Editor opening by 15%-20%
The first version of the Speedometer 3 benchmark was released last week. Read bgrins’ blog post about the benchmark, and how we’re collaborating with other browser vendors to develop a meaningful benchmark that has actually resulted in felt improvements to web performance.
Friends of the Firefox team
Resolved bugs (excluding employees)
Script to find new contributors from bug list
Volunteers that fixed more than one bug
Javi Rueda :javirid
New contributors (🌟 = first patch)
Artem Manushenkov made unchecking "Pick an element from the page" in "Available Toolbox Buttons" disable hotkey for opening element picker/inspector
Project Updates
Add-ons / Web Extensions
WebExtension APIs
Starting in Firefox 125 proxy.onRequest allows proxyAuthorizationHeader to be used also on HTTP intercepted requests - Bug 1794464
Developer Tools
DevTools
Artem Manushenkov updated the Watch Expressions input field placeholder value (#1619201)
Artem Manushenkov made sure that the "Pick an element from the page" keyboard shortcut is disabled when the feature itself is disabled. (#1763961)
Alexandre Poirot fixed the Network panel in the Browser Toolbox so it can actually show network requests (#1883947)
Alexandre Poirot added documentation for the JS tracer (#1884194)
Nicolas Chevobbe added support for CustomStateSet objects, used for Custom State pseudo classes (#1862896)
Caption: A CustomStateSet object is being inspected in the Firefox DevTools console. The example contains two entries: "initialized" and "custom-state".
behind dom.element.customstateset.enabled
WebDriver BiDi
Henrik Skupin vendored the new Puppeteer v22.4.0 release into mozilla-central (#1878632)
Henrik Skupin fixed mach puppeteer-test command to enable running the tests with Chrome, including the ability to specify a custom binary (#1877629)
Henrik Skupin fixed the behavior when running with only WebDriver BiDi enabled (without CDP), no recommended automation preferences were being set for Firefox (#1882748)
Henrik Skupin resolved a race condition in WebDriver BiDi when creating or switching between tabs within the same OS window. This fix ensures that the document.visibilityState value is correctly set to hidden when the corresponding commands are executed (#1877469)
Alexandra Borovova implemented the input.setFiles command, which allows clients to set the files property of a given input element with type file to a list of file paths (#1855040)
Julian Descottes added a new capability userAgent for WebDriver Classic and BiDi, which returns the default user agent (#1885495)
ESMification status
Standard8 has been cleaning up some obsolete JSM references in code.
ESMified status:
devtools: 89.29%
mobile: 98.37%
Everywhere else: 100%
Only 7 JSMs left in the tree!
Total: 99.54% (+0.19% from last time)
#esmification on Matrix
Lint, Docs and Workflow
Gijs has enabled a new rule to block adding more globals to browser.js.
Please see the metabug for details about splitting up browser.js.
Greg enabled the valid-jsdoc ruleset on the toolkit/components/translations/ component.
Standard8 enabled the ESLint no-console rule on production code.
See the announcement for more details.
Migration Improvements
This project is still in its early infancy, and we’re starting with measurement.
We’ve landed some probes and infrastructure over the past few days. We expect to have the initial probe landings done this week or early next. Then we can begin the next phase, which is to implement the “staging” of a backup in the background.
We’ve landed a patch to allow creating backups of the user preference state, off of the main thread.
Working with PM and UX, we think we’ve settled on a format for the single-file backup archive that ticks all of the boxes. We’ll hopefully have more details on that soon after we finish writing documentation for it.
Performance
The off-main-thread Jump List backend for Windows shipped today in Firefox 124!
Screenshots (enabled by default in Nightly)
This was mentioned in the meeting but I wanted to shout out again that the screenshots component is now enabled in Nightly (bug 1789727)! This allows screenshots on about: pages, has better performance, keyboard accessibility, and much more!
niklas fixed a bug where pasting into slack wasn’t working
niklas fixed a bug where black lines could appear in screenshots on certain zoom levels
Niklas is a new owner of the Screenshots module
Search and Navigation
The search configuration defines the search engines which are displayed to the user by default, according to their region, locale and other settings.
Standard8 and mcheang have enabled the new search configuration on nightly, due to ship in FF 126
This replaces the previous WebExtension + remote settings collection with a single remote settings collection for the configuration, and a separate one for icons.
Caption: Two technical diagrams of various components that communicate with the Firefox Search Service are displayed. In the first diagram, a "System add-ons shipped with Firefox" component feeds into the Search Service. In the second diagram, this item has been removed, since all configuration is now consolidated, coming from Remote Settings.
It also addresses complexities and other issues that were in the old configuration.
The same collection will also be picked up later this year by our mobile platforms, allowing easier updates to our search engine configuration across products.
Marco fixed a bug where bookmarks could not be imported for very large sets of bookmarks.
jteow, karendeep and scunnane continued work on improving our SERP (Search Engine Result Page) telemetry.
adw and dharvey continued work on improving cross-platform suggestions
Below the fold
This month’s Firefox / Toolkit :: General triagers are:
fchasen, cmkm, James, Micah
[gijs] Firefox for Android has joined us in mozilla-central! 🎉
[mconley] There’s an issue with artifact builds on macOS. The TL;DR is that if you have a local artifact build from anytime after the end of February, it might attempt to download and apply a patch, thinking that it’s on the “nightly” update channel. This can result in some weird behaviour, where (sometimes) ./mach run will result in a quick restart of the build, and a Nightly will launch with the official Nightly branding.
This is being tracked in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1885985.
Workarounds:
Run compiled builds (non-artifact)
Clobber frequently (should be relatively fast because we cache the binary bits we download locally)
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,
-Mike