Firefox Headlines (July 22nd, 2021)

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Doug Thayer

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Jul 22, 2021, 11:59:05 AM7/22/21
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Hello, Firefox fans!

It's here again - your fortnightly Nightly update. Every(ish) two weeks, a bunch of Firefox engineers get together and provide updates on what we're working on. A few of us stay after the meeting and collect the notes to send out to you fine folks! So without further ado, here it is:

Highlights

  • Happy Firefox 90 Day!

  • tkikuchi added a new about:third-party page to visualize third-party modules injected into Firefox processes (Windows-only)

  • Ava made it possible to queue a download to be opened when it’s finished by clicking on it from the downloads panel (Bug 1711053). Available behind the browser.download.improvements_to_download_panel pref:

  • Simplify Page for Printing has been reintroduced in Firefox 90

  • In 91, the Fission Beta experiment is aiming to enable Fission for 15% of the population, including Linux users.

  • The Nightly rollout is being increased to 70%. At this point, more than half of our Nightly population has Fission enabled!

    • You can check to see if you have Fission enabled by going to about:support, and checking the “Fission Windows” field. If it shows a number greater than 0, congratulations! You’re running with Fission.

  • Improved dark mode support on macOS will launch in Firefox 91! (bug 1623686)

Friends of the Firefox team

For contributions from June 29th to July 13th  2021, inclusive.

Introductions/Shout-Outs

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

Fixed more than one bug

  • Ava Katushka [:ava8katushka]

  • Kajal Sah [:kajalsah107]

  • Matthew N. [:MattN] ❤️

  • Michelle Goossens [:michelle]

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

Addon Manager & about:addons

  • The theme previews for the builtin themes listed in about:addons have been updated to match the new Proton UI - Bug 1708717

WebExtension APIs

  • As part of the work related to the Manifest Version 3 WebExtensions, we Introduced a new “action” WebExtensions API namespace (in practice it is an alias of the current browserAction API, restricted to extensions with manifest_version set to 3) - Bug 1706398

  • Some new WebRender-related browserSettings have been introduced in Firefox 91:

    • browser.browserSettings.colorManagement.mode (values: “off” / “full” / “tagged_only”) and browser.browserSettings.colorManagement.useNativeSRGB (values: true / false) - Bug 1714428 

    • browser.browserSettings.colorManagement.useWebRenderCompositor (values: true / false) - Bug 1719688

Downloads Panel

  • Other new changes behind the browser.download.improvements_to_download_panel pref:

    • Make “Save to disk” the default decision for files (Bug 1710941)

    • Download panel will automatically open when a download starts and there are no other downloads in progress (Bug 1709129)

Fission

  • In 91, the Fission Beta experiment is aiming to enable Fission for 15% of the population, including Linux users

  • The Nightly rollout is being increased to 70%. At this point, more than half of our Nightly population has Fission enabled!

Lint, Docs and Workflow

  • glandium turned on –enable-bootstrap by default

    • This means toolchains and other build dependencies (like node) will automatically be updated on `mach build` without the need to run `mach bootstrap`

  • marco turned on warnings in reviewbot. These are optional fixes which won’t cause a back out. This is the first time they are being surfaced by default

    • ESLint severity 1 issues are warnings

    • Other optional linters (like codespell) are also warnings

  • See full Engineering Effectiveness Newsletter for more

  • Standard8 landed a change to improve the documentation for our Mozilla specific ESLint rules.

macOS Spotlight

  • spohl is working on a fix for misaligned stoplight buttons in RTL locales (bug 1419375)

  • Work continues on improved fullscreen support, including being able to exit fullscreen with the Esc key (bug 1688584)

  • Work continues on improving memory pressure detection, which will reduce the number of prompts asking that apps be force quit.

Performance

Performance Tools

Privacy/Security

  • pbz updated the site data manager in about:preferences to group storage by base domain (eTLD+1) and support clearing storage per “cookie jar”. Bug 1711869, Bug 1712170

  • vringar is working on making the site data clearing confirmation dialog nicer when we only clear data for a single base domain. Bug 1715499

  • vringar is adding a confirmation dialog before clearing data via “Forget About This Site”. Bug 1711759

Proton/MR1

Search and Navigation

  • Harry fixed support for $ (url) and # (title) restriction tokens in the urlbar, though note they cannot be combined anymore with other restrictions. Bug 1719180 

  • Harry converted the last remaining old style urlbar provider to a modern one - Bug 1717509 

  • Gijs changed fixup to not generate alternate www.[...].com addresses for “http” and “https” strings. Bug 1719442 

Screenshots

  • Kajal has gotten started on porting over screenshots to its own browser component.. This work is behind the `screenshots.browser.component.enabled` pref and we expect to land the initial parts in the coming weeks.

Below the fold

  • [mconley] Joy of Profiling - Open to the public!

    • Mondays, 10AM ET (Zoom ID: 98769155293)

  • [mconley] Recent kerfuffle in Mercurial-land with reload.svg

  • [Standard8] A reminder to use the phab-test-policy add-on to remind you to add the testing policy when approving a patch in phabricator.

  • [Standard8] Also a reminder to investigate the phab-conventional-comments add-on to help you make it clearer what each comment in a review is (e.g. nit, suggestion, issue etc).

  • [mconley] Using HTML custom elements in browser UI? Great! You can inherit from MozHTMLElement to get inheritedAttributes support. Just don’t forget to call initializeAttributeInheritance after binding to the DOM.

  • [vringar] You can put add_task(<task definition>).only(); on a mochitest to only have this test run

    • You can also use .skip() to skip tests you aren’t interested in


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,


Doug

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