More WebExtensions! Coming to an Android near you soon - These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 147
Katherine Patenio
Highlights
Extensions process support in Firefox Android is going to ride the Gecko 120 release train (tracked by Bug 1859533). This has been one of the many things blocking full support for WebExtensions on Firefox for Android.
The plan is to allow users on Firefox for Android to install any supported WebExtension on addons.mozilla.org in the coming months! If you’re an addon developer, see this blog post for details.
pbz added a new button for clearing your session in Private Browsing windows, enabled by default in Nightly
- [screenshot]
- alt text: Screenshot of a new button for clearing private sessions on Firefox displayed on the toolbar, as well as a new dialog panel that appears after clicking the toolbar button.
Nicolas fixed many accessibility bugs in the Firefox DevTools. You can follow along in this progress chart!
Friends of the Firefox team
Resolved bugs (excluding employees)
Script to find new contributors from bug list
Volunteers that fixed more than one bug
Ganna
Itiel
Mathew Hodson
Sebastian Zartner [:sebo]
New contributors (🌟 = first patch)
Sebastian [:sebcode] added a check for profile before opening an url on macOS
anonymous0000007 removed an unused variable in crashreporter.cpp
🌟 Fideliu does not use PROCESS_MODE_BACKGROUND_BEGIN to run the minidum-analyzer in the background on Windows
vitaspiros removed signons.sqlite references
Project Updates
Add-ons / Web Extensions
WebExtensions Framework
Extensions process support in Firefox Android
Most of the work on the extensions process crash handling logic started in Firefox 117 and has been improved in 118, 119 and 120. This process has already been enabled for 100% of Beta and Nightly populations for a while (Nimbus rollouts) as well as on 118 Release for ~1% of the population.
This work initially prioritised for Firefox Android has also been contributing to handle extension process crashes on Firefox Desktop (Bug 1355239)
WebExtension APIs
Fixed behavior of the match_about_blank / matchAboutBlank content script configuration property: in Gecko < 120, when this flag is set to true, the related content script is implicitly injected in all top level about:blank pages. Starting with Gecko >= 120, it is going to be injected into top level about:blank pages only if the extension is also granted the <all_urls> permission - Bug 1853409
Addon Manager & about:addons
Changed message bar related to an add-on incompatible with the current app version into an error message bar (because the user cannot re-enable the add-ons marked as “app disabled” like in this case) - Bug 1856397
Developer Tools
DevTools
Contributors
:sebo added a new CSS warning displayed when `text-wrap: balance` is ignored because the number of lines is greater than 10. (bug)
Jamie (:jteh) fixed a bug with the Accessibility Panel in the Browser Toolbox which was unable to inspect popups (eg <input type=date>'s calendar).
Hubert (:bomsy) fixed a bug in the Debugger where you would see "undefined" tooltips displayed on top of Debugger inline previews (bug).
Alex (:ochameau) has landed several performance improvements for the Debugger. (bug, bug, bug)
Nicolas (:nchevobbe) added a pretty print button in the Style Editor, so that you can force pretty printing in case it did not automatically happen. (bug)
- [screenshot]
- alt text: Screenshot of a button to force pretty printing in devtools Style Editor.
Nicolas fixed a bug with the "Copy Location" context menu item of the ruleview, which was ignoring sourcemap information (bug)
Migration Improvements
The patches to allow users on Ubuntu to import from Chromium when Firefox is installed as a Snap package have landed! This is still undergoing testing from QA, but if all goes well, this should ride out in Firefox 120.
We’ve removed the ability to switch back to the old XUL-based migration dialog, in preparation for removing the old dialog altogether after the soft-freeze ends.
For users migrating data between devices, we ran an experiment to see if adding adorable illustrations to the wizard on the switching-devices SUMO page would result in more people getting through the process. Interestingly, it seemed to have a small but significant effect! We’ve enabled the illustrations by default.
- [screenshot]
- alt text: Illustration of a very adorable fox peeking from a bundle of cardboard boxes.
Performance Tools (aka Firefox Profiler)
Display nicer time units in the timeline ruler for values that are better expressed in minutes or hours. (PR #4774)
- [screenshot]
- Alt text: Screenshot of the Firefox Profiler timeline displayed in minutes or hours.
Show the hovered time at the top of the timeline
- [screenshot]
- Alt text: Screenshot of a Firefox Profiler timeline displaying a newly implemented vertical line that appears when you hover over a specific time
We now display a vertical line in the timeline when hovering over markers and the stack chart. See this video.
Performance improvements
Improve call tree and flame graph performance for big profiles
Make removing a focus function faster
Avoid showing the call tree panel when there's no sample
Custom tracks from markers
We can now profile build jobs on Taskcluster!
- [screenshot]
- Alt text: Screenshot of CI tasks running on treeherder and a newly implemented "Open in Firefox Profiler" button on the page.
- [screenshot]
- Alt text: Screenshot of a Firefox Profiler page, after opening it from treeherder.
Example from try: https://share.firefox.dev/46VjifF
You can get a profile of your local build by running ./mach resource-usage
Privacy/Security
Search and Navigation
Drew (:adw) finished integrating the Rust Suggest component into Desktop: 1851255, 1855884, 1857396, 1855884
Drew removed support for individual help and dismiss buttons in a Urlbar result as the functionality is currently accessible from the urlbar results menu: 1827966
Dale(:daleharvey) continued work on recent searches, which allows user to see a list of recent searches while the URL bar is in a zero prefix mode: 1852848, 1858639
Marc Seibert(:mseibert) made it such that trimming the URLs in the URL bar only occurs if the directionality doesn't change to RTL: 1836962
Mandy(:mcheang) continued work on Search Service improvements, refactoring initialization and setting up the steps for SearchService to eventually migrate to a new search configuration: 1855084, 1852792
Karandeep(:klubana) tweaked the UI of a clipboard suggestion to use a chiclet, different text, and icon: 1858141
Storybook/Reusable Components
sclements fixed a bug where the panel-list sub-menu was getting cut off when the browser window isn’t wide enough (Bug 1855827)
ganna landed a patch to use moz-message-bar in the unified extensions panel (Bug 1844850)
ganna landed a fix for an issue where split buttons in chrome panels had a gap between the buttons (Bug 1854420)
emilio fixed an issue where calling setAttribute("selectedIndex", 0) on the XUL deck element wasn’t working as expected (Bug 1856189)
hjones landed a patch to make the space between the new toggle label and button clickable (Bug 1852827)
mstriemer has been working on renaming all of the things from “XUL Widgets” to “UI Widgets”
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,
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