Smarter Searches - These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 182
Mike Conley
Highlights
The Search team has enabled the new URL bar search experience by default 🎉 and fixed action mode layout. See bugs: 1967857, 1967721
Caption: A screenshot of a Google search for “mozilla firefox shirt” in Firefox Nightly, showing the Firefox address bar’s search engine selection feature. The dropdown menu displays alternative search options including Google, Amazon, Bing, DuckDuckGo, eBay, and Wikipedia.
As of Firefox 140, users are able to hide the Extensions button
You can right-click on the toolbar item and choose “Remove from Toolbar”
Caption: The context menu for the Extensions toolbar button in Firefox Nightly showing options for toolbar customization. The selected item is “Remove from Toolbar,” with additional options for the Bookmarks Toolbar and “Customize Toolbar…”
This was remarkably complex to get right - see these bugs for details: Bug 1948258, Bug 1948259, Bug 1948260, Bug 1948261, Bug 1948263, Bug 1966935, Bug 1964857
Custom wallpapers / background colours for New Tab are being rolled out across all channels - see the Firefox 139 release notes here!
Caption: Firefox Nightly’s New Tab customization panel, showing wallpaper options including Abstract, Solid colors, Photographs, and Celestial, along with a new option to use a custom image.
Friends of the Firefox team
Resolved bugs (excluding employees)
Volunteers that fixed more than one bug
Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]
New contributors (🌟 = first patch)
🌟 Jilvin Jacob added various status checks to the WriteBitmap() function to handle potential write failures when saving bitmap images when setting images as the desktop background on Windows.
🌟 Matthias Riffard replaced hardcoded 'transparent' values in test_moz_button.html with CSS variables from our design system.
🌟 Robert Kirkman modified the nsGTKRemoteServer initialization to prevent segmentation faults when both DBus is disabled and no display server is running.
🌟 Rohit Borse corrected an error message displayed when attempting to take an oversized full-page screenshot with our DevTools
🌟 vinhle000 removed the now unused _showPreOnboardingModal function and its related test from BrowserGlue, cleaning up deprecated onboarding code.
Project Updates
Add-ons / Web Extensions
WebExtensions Framework
As part of work to allow the WPT WebExtensions tests (initiative coordinated with other browser vendors through the WebExtensions Community Group), changes needed to load/unload extensions from the WPT marionette executor have landed in Firefox 140 - Bug 1950636
A Nightly-only regression that prevented access to DOM storage APIs from extension iframes injected by content scripts into webpages has been fixed in Nightly 140 - Bug 1965552
WebExtension APIs
As part of the work on the tabGroups API namespace, fixes for a few additional Chrome incompatibilities reported by extension developers have been landed in Firefox 140 and uplifted to 139 - Bug 1963825, Bug 1963830, Bug 1965007
Support for SameSiteStatus ”unspecified” has been introduced in the Firefox WebExtensions cookies API - Bug 1550032
Addon Manager & about:addons
More work around the Local AI models UI in about:addons has been landed in Firefox 140 (Bug 1944695, Bug 1947209, Bug 1961440, Bug 1967224)
Fixed XPIProvider async shutdown timeout hit due to call to nsIClearData service triggered too late during an already initiated application shutdown - Bug 1967273
Follow-ups to the NewTab built-in add-on incident hit in Firefox 138:
New telemetry probe added in Firefox 139 to track failures to write the addonStartup.json.lz4 file back to disk (Bug 1966154), meant to help us confirm the effectiveness of the fix landed in Firefox 139 (Bug 1964281) and get better signals about other write errors that could lead to addonStartup.json.lz4 data to become stale.
Changes applied to the XPIProvider to make sure that, in case of lost or stale addonStartup.json.lz4 data, add-ons from the app-builtin-addons (auto-installed builtins like NewTab) and app-system-addons (system-signed add-on updates got from the Application Update Service, a.k.a. Balrog) are still being detected and started early on the application startup - Bug 1964408 / Bug 1966736 (both landed in Firefox 140)
To support serving system-signed updates to the NewTab built-in add-on outside of the release train, system-signed updates applied to built-in add-ons are no longer uninstalled when an existing Firefox profile is being upgraded to a new Firefox version - Bug 1966736 (landed in Firefox 140)
DevTools
Rohit Borse fixed the warning message text when taking a screenshot that's too large (#1953285)
Keith Cirkel [:keithamus] added CloseWatcher "close" and "cancel" event listeners breakpoints (#1966702)
Nicolas Chevobbe [:nchevobbe] added pointerrawupdate to Event Listener Breakpoints (#1957000)
Holger Benl [:hbenl] fixed some rendering issue in the Debugger sources tree (#1967248)
Emilio Cobos Álvarez (:emilio) fixed a regression where painting was blocked when the Debugger was paused (#1967931)
Alexandre Poirot [:ochameau] fixed a crash that was happening when navigating to a privileged page from about:debugging when connected to Firefox for Android (#1963915)
Nicolas Chevobbe [:nchevobbe] improved the inspector "search HTML" feature by allowing to use pseudo-element selectors (#1871881) and fixing autocomplete suggestions for pseudo elements (#1542277)
Hubert Boma Manilla (:bomsy) fixed an issue in the Debugger where it wouldn't scroll to expected location on pause when there was an active search (#1962417)
WebDriver BiDi
Henrik modified the code that syncs the running state of Marionette and the Remote Agent - exposed to websites via the navigator.webdriver Web IDL attribute - between the parent and web content processes, so that it now runs asynchronously and no longer risks blocking the parent process.
Julian fixed a bug for our browsing context events which were unexpectedly emitted for webextension Browsing Contexts - at the moment we only emit events for regular content Browsing Contexts.
Olli Pettay improved the Actions' implementation in both Marionette and WebDriver BiDi to prevent microtasks from being blocked while individual events are dispatched.
Sasha added support for "acceptInsecureCerts" argument to "browser.createUserContext" command. This argument allows clients to disable or enable certificate related security settings for a specific user context (aka Firefox container) and override the settings specified for a session.
Julian implemented a new browsing context event, browsingContext.navigationCommitted, which should be emitted as soon as a new document has been created for a navigation. Together with our other navigation events (navigationStarted, navigationFailed) this allows clients to know that a navigation is going to be completed.
Henrik released mozdownload 1.30.0 with added support for Python 3.13.
Lint, Docs and Workflow
Our ESLint configuration is now using the "flat" configuration.
You may need to restart your editor after updating.
(see above!) If you've worked with aboutwelcome / asrouter / newtab code, you may need to re-install the node modules for those components, e.g. ./mach npm ci --prefix browser/extensions/newtab
Next steps are to upgrade to the latest v9 ESLint in stages to make the upgrades simpler. Bug for ESLint v9.6.0.
Mark Kennedy enabled the lit rule no-invalid-html.
Migration Improvements
We’ve disabled Payment Method import for Chromium-based Microsoft Edge profiles due to application-bound encryption changes. We’re currently collaborating with the Credential Management team to find creative, sustainable ways to make migrating from other browsers easier.
New Tab Page
Lots of visual fixes for the “Sections” UI that we’ve been working on. You can manually check out Sections by setting browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.discoverystream.sections.enabled to true
A redesigned Firefox Nightly New Tab page showcasing a prominent “Popular Today” section with curated news stories. Below that is the top of another section with “Science” as its title.
Picture-in-Picture
kpatenio fixed an issue with the cursor not hiding with other controls on fullscreen PiP windows (bug)
kpatenio also fixed the context menu not appearing after ctrl + click over the PiP toggle on macOS (bug)
Search and Navigation
Drew, Daisuke and Yazan fixed bugs related to suggestions favicons, sponsored label, telemetry, and enabling the Firefox Suggest, as part of its geo expansion into regions such as UK. Bugs: 1966811, 1964392, 1966328, 1966328, 1948143, 1964390, 1964979
Mak is working on semantic history search for a future experiment. Bugs:1967985, 1968020 1967228, 1965225
Dao fixed accessibility issue for matching tab groups when searching via ULRbar 1963884 and he’s been working on bugs related to offering tab groups in address bar 1966140, 1966337
Mortiz is working on bugs related to on adding custom search engine dialog in about:preferences#search and is enabled by default (see 1964507 and 1967739)
Caption: Firefox Nightly showing the context menu for the YouTube search field, with the option “Add Search Engine” highlighted—allowing users to add YouTube as a custom search engine.
Caption: Firefox’s Search Settings panel showing a list of custom and default search engines, including Searchfox, eBay, Wikipedia (en), and YouTube—each with a keyword shortcut like @sf or @youtube. Below the list are buttons for “Restore Default Search Engines,” “Add,” and disabled options for “Edit” and “Remove.”
Caption: The “Add Search Engine” dialog box in Firefox Nightly is shown, with input fields for the search engine name, a URL containing %s as a placeholder for the query, and an optional keyword shortcut. Buttons at the bottom include “Advanced,” “Cancel,” and a disabled “Add Engine.”
Standard8 has enabled the Rust-backed engine selector for late Beta and Release 1967490
jteow and Standard8 are working on TypeScript definitions 1966899, 1964675, 1966237, 1963781
Storybook/Reusable Components/Acorn Design System
Graph on arewedesigntokensyet and updated how we determine token usage
Components in development:
new component on the way, moz-breadcrumbs
New single-select listbox type for moz-visual-picker
Icon support for moz-select coming soon
Below the fold
General triage
Marco, Mark, Luca and Johannes are this month’s Firefox / Toolkit :: General triagers!
June 2025: Jared Hirsch, Hanna Alemu, Jonathan Sudiaman, Stephen Thompson
[standard8] Don't forget to re-setup your repository (git) hooks after the migration to the new repository.
[mconley] If you work on newtab / asrouter / aboutwelcome code (especially regenerating the bundles), you'll need to update the relevant installed node modules with ./mach npm ci --prefix browser/extensions/newtab etc). Otherwise you may get issues with the bundles being out of date when you land / run on CI, and possibly other tests failing locally
[mconley] Using jujutsu in Firefox code
[maxx] ./mach try has presets! ./mach try --list-presets will show you the list, and `
https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/tools/tryselect/try_presets.yml
Also ./mach try again
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