Firefox Headlines (September 9th, 2021)
Mike Conley
Hello firefox-dev!
A few weeks back, the Firefox Desktop engineering teams got together to pool notes and talk about the recent happenings in and amongst the codebase. I've taken the liberty of synthesizing the meeting notes into something slightly more digestible.
Enjoy!
Highlights
Nightly users on Windows now have the Tab Unloader enabled, which will unload background tabs in low-memory situations
The Tab Unloader works hard to only unload tabs it thinks you don’t immediately need - so it tries not to unload tabs that are playing media, using WebRTC, or are pinned.
Some great work from our Privacy and Security team resulted in some nice pageload performance wins!
Daisuke improved Address Bar performance with long typed strings - see Bug 1664814, Bug 1724016, Bug 1725318
A special shout-out to the DevTools Team, which has finished Milestone 3 for Fission support!
Milestone 3 was focused on resolving issues caused by the Fission refactoring, and includes work to fix critical performance regressions and tests that are currently disabled or failing for Fission.
Friends of the Firefox team
Introductions/Shout-Outs
Huge welcome to new hiresKatherine Patenio and Niklas Baumgardner
Katherine previously worked on Review Board through a student project
Niklas previously worked on Firefox’s Picture-in-Picture feature through a student project
Both will be working on driving the DTD -> Fluent migration to completion as their first project
Resolved bugs (excluding employees)
Fixed more than one bug
Antonin LOUBIERE
Ava Katushka
Kajal Sah
New contributors (🌟 = first patch)
🌟 Mohit fixed a broken “Learn more” link in the DevTools Performance panel
🌟 Tzvika Ofek corrected one of the DevTools Inspector tooltips for CSS flex rules
Project Updates
Add-ons / Web Extensions
WebExtensions Framework
Bug 1717760 (initKeyEvent on KeyboardEvent should return undefined) has regressed the ability of auto-filling input fields for some extensions in Firefox 93, this has impacted password manager extensions in recent nightly builds:
Bitwarden has fixed the issue on the extension side - Bug 1724925
1password classic is also impacted - Bug 1725232
We may be putting off unshipping KeyboardEvent.initKeyEvent for the extensions content scripts as a short term fix on the Firefox side - Bug 1727024. Thanks to Masayuki and :smaug for looking into that.
Fixed a couple of issues with custom prefs set for the xpcshell tests (Bug 1723198, Bug 1723536), not an issue specific to the extensions tests but we identified it while investigating a backout due to an unexpected android-only failure (Bug 1722966 comment 12).
WebExtension APIs
Fixed an issue with restoring private tabs discarded earlier during their creation (not specifically an addon issue, but it could be mainly triggered by addons using the browser.tabs.discard API) - Bug 1727024
Fission
Nightly users now are at 63% with Fission enabled
Beta users now are at 33% with Fission enabled
Form Autofill
:tgiles fixed an expiry date autofill issue where autofill would incorrectly fill expiration month as a one digit string
:tgiles fixed autofill not autofilling the credit card expiry date correctly if the site is using FR locale year placeholders
Lint, Docs and Workflow
ESLint related node_modules have been updated, which adds support for top-level await in javascript modules (not .jsms).
Phabricator will now report warnings for ESLint (as well as other platforms), and so might your editor. Whilst we haven't extensively used warnings, we are testing it out with the work towards removing uses of OS.File.
Nimbus / Experiments
Experimenting with new targeting attributes that are based on profile activity
And working on adding multi-feature experiments
Password Manager
Thanks to Antonin (pyjacpp) for adding date and alert sorting for the login list in about:logins
Thanks to Antonin (pyjacpp) for adding the ability to sort logins by username in about:logins
:pbz fixed an issue where the primary password was repeatedly prompted twice due to auth tokens and cache being cleared when purging trackers.
Thanks to :dimi and :pbz for tracking this issue down
:tgiles fixed the about:logins FxA avatar display logic so the initials avatar should appear now and the default avatar should display when first creating an FxA account on about:logins
There was a regression with loading logins in about:logins, which should be fixed very soon by an NSS update.
Performance
Proton/MR1
All of the blockers for putting most of the strings (minus menubar strings) in sentence case for en-US appears to be fixed! We’re checking around to see if there are any leftovers that we somehow missed. If you find any, please mark them as blocking this bug.
Search and Navigation
Daisuke fixed a regression where jar: urls were not visited from the Address Bar - Bug 1726305
Daisuke fixed a visual bug in the separate Search Bar where search engine buttons were sometimes cut - Bug 1722507
Gijs made the Address Bar “not secure” chiclet visible with most locales and added a tooltip - Bug 1724212
Harry fixed a regression where some results were not shown if history results were disabled in Address Bar settings - Bug 1725652
Mark switched the Search Service tests to use IOUtils - Bug 1726565
Screenshots
Kajal landed a patch that adds telemetry to the Screenshots UI
Kajal is landing patches to port screenshots into its own browser component, which is currently behind the “screenshots.browser.component.enabled”. She set up a tabdialog box for the preview state, hooking up copy, download, and cancel functionality
Below the fold
[mconley] Show Unified in Phabricator for new files is very handy
[mconley] Consider pair programming / pair reviews for knowledge transfer
[bgrins] Was screensharing searchfox and showing someone new around, and old-timers have to remember that we have a lot of things we take for granted.
[jaws] Inline comments on Phabricator
[Standard8] You can “Suggest Edits” in Phabricator too! Which is probably better than putting your suggestion in the review comment
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,
-Mike
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