Customizing Reader Mode - These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 158
Niklas Baumgardner
Highlights
Irene has just landed a patch supporting custom color themes! You can flip the pref reader.colors_menu.enabled to preview this feature in Nightly. Bug 1876432 - Add support for custom themes as its own menu in Reader View
Niklas added RTL support for the new screenshots UI component (currently enabled by default in Nightly)
Shout-out to Paul Bone who landed some changes to mozjemalloc, reducing the number of calls to VirtualAlloc. This change caused various improvements (3.5% - 5%) to both Speedometer 2 and Speedometer 3 subtests, with no measurable regression in memory usage!
The Search team enabled Search Config V2 in Nightly, and this has shown multiple improvements in startup time, by at least 3%!
Friends of the Firefox team
Resolved bugs (excluding employees)
Script to find new contributors from bug list
New contributors (🌟 = first patch)
Golubets added an option to disable split console
Project Updates
Add-ons / Web Extensions
WebExtensions Framework
Fixed a regression introduced in Firefox 116 for extensions including a sidebar command shortcut (fixed in Nightly 126 and Beta 125) - Bug 1881820
Thanks to Dao for investigating the regression and then following up with a fix
Fixed a long standing uninterruptible reflow triggered by browser-addons.js on handling “addon-install-confirmation” notifications - Bug 1360028
Thanks to Dao for fixing it too!
ESMification status
Thank you to everyone that has worked on and supported this effort.
Plan for out-of-tree changes & removing old loaders is coming soon.
Lint, Docs and Workflow
Dave has now finished landing and turning on the argument linting for no-unused-vars
Migration Improvements
The measurements bugs are basically done, just a few outstanding ones that should hopefully close out this week. We’re now focusing more on copying the various data stores to the “staging” directory.
We’re in talks with the DOM team to get their support for cloning privileged and WebExtension IndexedDB databases safely at runtime.
Screenshots (enabled by default in Nightly)
Niklas fixed selection pixel size issues with high device pixel ratios
Niklas fixed issues with right clicking while dragging in the overlay
Search and Navigation
Firefox Suggest experience
Work continues integrating the new Rust backend and improving exposure metrics.
Daisuke has exposed icons mime-types along with blobs, from the offline Suggest backend. Bug 1882967
Drew has fixed a problem with the recording of exposure metrics in experiments. Bug 1886175
Clipboard result
Karandeep has fixed a problem with empty searches returning no results in Tab, History and Bookmarks Search Mode, and a problem with the clipboard result persisting when switching through multiple empty tabs. Bug 1884094, Bug 1865336
SERP categorization metrics
Stephanie and James have fixed multiple issues in this area.
Categorization metric has been enabled in Nightly.
Search Config v2
Standard8 and Mandy have fixed multiple issues in this area.
Work continues as Config v2 has been enabled in Nightly.
Frecency ranking
Marco has changed frecency recalculation to accelerate when many changes have been made from the last recalculation. This should help with large imports. Bug 1873629
Marco has corrected a schema migration mistake, preventing recalculation of frecency for not recently accessed domains. That caused autofill of domains to not work as expected in the Address Bar for Firefox 125 Nightly (and first week of Beta). Bug 1886975
Other fixes
Drew has corrected visual alignment of weather results. Bug 1886694
Dale has corrected visual alignment of rich search suggestions. Bug 1871022
Storybook/Reusable Components
Design Tokens
We've recently landed some changes to how our design tokens are handed in mozilla-central, we now have a JSON source of truth for these tokens
To update the tokens files (tokens-shared, tokens-platform, tokens-brand), you'll need to modify the design-tokens.json file and then run ./mach npm run build --prefix=toolkit/themes/shared/design-system
Our current docs can be found on Storybook: JSON design tokens, and the more general design tokens docs
Porting these docs over to Firefox Source Docs will happen in the next couple of days
This info will also be sent out to the firefox-dev mailing list with more details and links to Firefox Source Docs
Below the fold
This month’s Firefox / Toolkit :: General triagers are:
mconley, mkaply, Emily, Katherine
We’ve talked to various engineering managers in the Firefox-org, and we’re going to be populating the next bunch of months soon.
[Stephanie] I wrote a regex in one of my patches last week, and in his review, James pointed out that I could use non-capture groups rather than capture groups. (?:subpattern) vs. (subpattern). Both work for grouping a subpattern so that you can apply a quantifier (or a disjunction, like (subpattern1|subpattern2)). But a non-capture group is a bit of a performance optimization because the regex engine doesn't need to remember the group for back references and lookaheads. Freebie performance boost in a lot of cases!
PSA to try them out! Poking around Searchfox, I see that they aren't all that common in desktop code - I'm guessing they could be used way more often than they are.
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,
Niklas