Smarter Search, Smoother Tools - These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 190

[Anna Kulyk]

Hey Firefox friends! 

We’re back with another round of highlights and improvements from across Firefox!

Highlights

• Google Lens support has been turned on by default in the latest nightly builds.

• When Google is your default search engine, and you right click an image you'll see a new context menu entry:

• [Screenshot]

• Semantic history search has now also been enabled in the latest nightly and beta builds.

• This uses a local machine learning model to suggest entries from history that are related to your searches based on natural language understanding in the address bar.

• Alexandre Poirot [:ochameau] improved the editor by displaying an editor widget where you can navigate between the different calls to a given function (#1908889) [Screenshot]

• The WebExtension cookies.set API method rejection on invalid cookies is riding the Firefox 145 release train (after it has been kept as a nightly only behavior for 3 nightly cycles) - Bug 1976509

Friends of the Firefox team

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

Volunteers that fixed more than one bug

• Isaac Briandt

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

• David [:david-loe] improved accessibility of timepicker

• Isaac Briandt updated build-bergamot.py and upload-bergamot.py to utilize zstd compression and updated Translations RemoteSettings schemas

• 🌟 Vlad L updated ipv6 representation algorithm

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

Addon Manager & about:addons

• As part of finalizing the Add-ons telemetry migration from legacy telemetry to Glean, the EnvironmentAddonBuilder (responsible for collecting the activeAddons/Theme/GMPlugins metrics in Glean and mirror it in the legacy telemetry environment) has been refactored out of the TelemetryEnvironment ES module - Bug 1981496

DevTools

• Sebastian Zartner [:sebo] added inactive CSS icon when overflow* properties are used in non-block, non-flex, non-grid containers (#1583898)

• Artem Manushenkov fixed a memory leak in the Inspector (#1986144)

• Holger Benl [:hbenl] fixed an issue where screenshots taken in Responsive Design Mode could have unexpected dimensions (#1979518)

• Nicolas Chevobbe [:nchevobbe] made the Accessibility panel color simulation persist on page reload (#1770707)

• Alexandre Poirot [:ochameau] fixed a Debugger crash that could happen when clicking on stacktrace frames from the console (#1985446)

• Hubert Boma Manilla (:bomsy) fixed Debugger pretty printing of sources containing characters represented by more than one code unit (#1985689)

• Hubert Boma Manilla (:bomsy) updated the version of Babel which we're using to handle top level await detection, which fixed a few issues (#1900314)

• Alexandre Poirot [:ochameau] fixed an issue in the Network pane (reported by Jake), where the search would never complete (#1983792)

• Julian Descottes [:jdescottes] fixed a Network Monitor crash that was occurring when setting network override on requests requiring CORS preflight (#1986615)

• Nicolas Chevobbe [:nchevobbe] fixed an issue that was affecting the Changes panel on pages with multiple documents (that includes the Browser Toolbox) (#1798774)

WebDriver BiDi

• Henrik disabled the BackupService component by default for the Remote Protocol (Marionette / WebDriver BiDi), as it isn't required for web automation tasks.

• Julian implemented the `browsingContext.downloadEnd` event, which is emitted either when a download is completed or canceled.

• Sasha implemented the "emulation.setUserAgentOverride" command for WebDriver BiDi, allowing clients to override the user agent string per browsing context, user context, or globally in Firefox + also fixed Bug 1705326 - navigator.userAgent still returns custom UA after clearing browsingContext.customUserAgent if a reload happened while the custom UA was set

• Bug fixes

• Julian updated the browsingContext.downloadWillBegin event to emit the correct `navigation` id, either the same one as the corresponding `browsingContext.navigationStarted` event, or null if the download was started by a link with a `download` attribute.

• Julian fixed a crash occurring when `network.provideResponse` was used to override a response requiring a CORS preflight.

• Julian fixed a bug with network events incorrectly flagged as blocked (`isBlocked=true`), even if they were not blocked for technical reasons - eg. coming from memory cache or using `data` scheme.

• Julian updated the `network.beforeRequestSent` events to have `destination` set to “document” for top-level loads.

• Julian fixed an encoding issue with `network.getData` which will now always use utf-8 when serializing as text.

• Julian also updated `network.getData` to no longer throw if the response body is empty. 

Lint, Docs and Workflow

• First mentioned a month ago, the tier-3 TypeScript linter has now been fixed so that it runs when the components it watches are touched. Previously it would only be run when the type information was changed.

• ESLint

• We discovered the require-jsdoc rules were not being applied due to a mistake when upgrading to flat config or ESLint v9. These have now been re-enabled, with follow-ups being landed to fix the new issues raised since the mistake was introduced.

• The no-browser-refs-in-toolkit rule has now been promoted to an error, except for cases where it currently fails (stays as a warning). Please avoid introducing new cases.

• The ESLint configuration inspector should now be working when run against firefox-main. This is a very useful tool for inspecting the configuration and determining which globals and rules are applied to which files.

• Gijs updated our documentation for ESLint environments, which no longer work in the same way with v9.

• /** eslint-env foo */ no longer works.

• The files either need the correct extensions, or adding to eslint-file-globals.config.mjs. See the comments at the top of the file for more information.

Information Management/Sidebar

• There’s been a few fixes for the drag-to-pin work that’s in 143; these will be in the dot release.

• Add a check for promo card to ensure we don't show it prematurely

• 1989344 - Adjust interaction cue timing for drag to pin

• Nikki has improved tab animation for vertical and horizontal tabs with tab stacking

• Split View work is still early days but the meta bug is here.

• We’re aiming to get sidebar.revamp turned on by default in Nightly only in 145 so we’re greening up a few tests then work on some old sidebar parity bugs before enabling this in release.

Profile Management

• Jared fixed bug 1941854, [Windows] Additional window (skeleton UI) opens with Profile Selector on Firefox startup

• Maile fixed bug 1955173, The favicons of the Profiles about: pages are not displayed properly in the List all tabs menu

• Niklas fixed bug 1965598, The Usage Profile Group ID should be shared by all profiles in a group     

• Jaws fixed bug 1987317, Firefox won't launch a profile if the library of that profile is open     

• Jaws fixed bug 1988882, SelectableProfileService uses the wrong value for the rgb color property     

• Jaws fixed bug 1990020, Small fixes in SelectableProfileService

Search and Navigation

• Work continues on modularising and re-using the address bar code to replace the existing search bar.

• This will allow us to simplify the existing code, remove dependence on the toolkit autocomplete widget, and bring more features to the separate search bar.

• 
  

• Search Engines identifiers and telemetry.

• We've now removed nsISearchEngine.identifier, and deprecated nsISearchEngine.telemetryId. nsISearchEngine.id still exists.

• These are fields that would contain a mixture of information about a search engine (an identifier, partner code and sometimes more). This would analysis via telemetry more difficult.

• If you're reporting search engine information either via telemetry or to other systems, please use the separate id / partnerCode fields on nsISearchEngine or check with the search team for your case.

Storybook/Reusable Components/Acorn Design System

• moz-button supports type=”split”(Bug 1858811). Setting menuId on the split button links its “More options” button to a panel-list with the same id. (Storybook)

• [Screenshot]

• Support for the support-page attribute was added to the moz-box-item (Bug 1990839)

• New --font-size-xxlarge (2.2rem - 33px) token was added. (Bug 1961988)

• Usage of border-radius was updated to use design tokens values (Bug 1983938)

Below the fold

General triage

• Hanna Jones, Chidam Gopal, and Yubin Jamora are this month’s Firefox / Toolkit :: General triagers!

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,

Anna