The Firefox Unleashed - These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 141

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Katherine Patenio

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Jul 5, 2023, 11:09:24 AM7/5/23
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Hey Firefox fans,

Last week, several Firefox Desktop engineers came together to talk about the latest updates. If you're interested, check them out below!

Special thanks to niklas and mconley for helping me put together these highlights.

Highlights

  • We were able to disable some Spectre / Meltdown JIT mitigations! Nightly-only for now.

    • These were mitigations we deployed years ago to protect users against various timing attacks. With Fission shipped, and ORB enabled on Nightly

    • “This improves performance for JS-heavy workloads: at least 6% on JetStream 2 and 2-3% for a number of the TodoMVC sub tests in Speedometer 3.”

  • niklas landed a brand new Picture-in-Picture control: a volume slider!

    • [screenshot]
      • alt text: Screenshot of Picture-in-Picture video controls including the brand new volume slider

    • We used to only have a mute toggle, but now you can have better control of the volume level

    • If you see any issues with the slider, you can file a bug here

  • Nicolas is working on adding support for CSS nesting across the toolbox

    • Show parent rules selectors for nested rules (bug)

      • [screenshot]

        • alt text: Screenshot of the devtools style editor showing parent rule selectors stacked on top of one another

    • StyleEditor rule count doesn't account for nested rules (bug)

    • at-rules nested in regular rules are not displayed in the at-rules panel (bug)

  • Starting in Firefox 116, the WebExtension tabs API has a new tab.autoDiscardable property, which an extension can use to signal to the browser which tabs shouldn’t be discarded automatically (Bug 1809094). Thanks to Gregory Pappas for implementing that!

  • If you want to test importing passwords in Firefox 116 from CSV / TSV files or importing passwords from Safari, set signon.management.page.fileImport.enabled to true.

    • [screenshot]
      • alt text: Screenshot of the migration wizard and a new option called "Passwords from CSV file" being selected

Friends of the Firefox team

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

Volunteers that fixed more than one bug

  • Ganna 

  • Gregory Pappas [:gregp]

  • Itiel 

  • Jonas Jenwald [:Snuffleupagus]

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

  • 🌟 Matt Moldenhauer adjusted CSS to position icon in about firefox window

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

Addon Manager & about:addons
WebExtensions Framework

  • Thanks to Gregory Pappas, we now have:

    • A new action.getUserSettings API method, which an extension can use to know whether its action toolbar button has been pinned to a Firefox toolbar (Bug 1814905)

WebExtension APIs

  • Fixed another regression related to the nativeMessaging API (introduced in Firefox 114 from the changes introduced from Bug 1772932, fixed in Firefox >= 114.0.2 by Bug 1837830)

    • NOTE: be aware of the different behavior between OS.Path and PathUtils on paths that include  "..", for which PathUtils.joinRelative will be throwing an exception (See Bug 1837830 comment 12 for additional details).

Developer Tools

DevTools

  • Contributors

    • Gregory Pappas removed the unused devtools.remote.wifi.scan pref (bug)

    • Sebastian Zartner (sebo) finished the last touch of his phenomenal work on Custom Formatters. They can now be enabled from DevTools settings panel (bug)

      • He's working on documentation and a blog post!

      • [screenshot]
        • alt text: Screenshot of a sample Custom Formatter displayed in devtools

  • Other teams

    • Thanks to Emilio for helping us on multiple fronts:

      • fixed an issue in the inspector where CSS variables set on the shadow DOM host element are shown as not set in the inherited DOM (bug)

      • Added a way to get desugared selector of a given nested rule (bug)

      • Fixed an invalidation issue on InspectorUtils.parseStyleSheet , with nested rules (bug)

      • Fixed InspectorUtils.selectorMatchesElement for nested rules (bug)

  • Nicolas migrated ruleCount.label to Fluent (bug)

    • DevTools is the last consumer of legacy plural form string and Eemili would like those to go away (bug)

  • Julian fixed an inspector issue where we were incorrectly displaying overridden property as active (bug)

  • Nicolas added a "container" badge in markup view for element with a (inline-)size container-type (bug)

    • [screenshot]
      • alt text: Screenshot of a "container" badge displayed in devtools markup view

  • Alex is continuing his quest to improve the debugger codebase and make it faster (bug, bug, bug, bug, bug)

  • Alex also moved the tracer button to the right (bug) and added the keyboard shortcut in the icon's tooltip (bug)

    • Behind devtools.debugger.features.javascript-tracing

    • [screenshot]
      • Screenshot of the devtools tracer button in its new position and of its updated tooltip message including the keyboard shortcut

  • Finally Alex added documentation about DevTools watcher architecture (bug)

  • Nicolas fixed a regression that would cause the debugger panel to crash when debugging a website containing files with malformed URI (bug)

  • Hubert fixed the netmonitor so we don't show the "proxy-authentication" HTTP header, since it's actually not sent to the server (bug)

WebDriver BiDi

  • Henrik removed the moz:useNonSpecCompliantPointerOrigin capability (bug)

  • Sasha implemented the session.end command (bug)

  • Henrik incremented the time we wait for initial page loaded for  "WebDriver:NewSession" to reduce the possibility of errors when creating a new session

ESMification status

  • ESMified status:

    • browser: 85%

    • toolkit: 99%

    • Total:  94.42% (up from 91.9%)

  • #esmification on Matrix

  • Migration Document (with a walkthrough!)

Migration Improvements

  • The new migration wizard has been rolled out to 100% of users on the release channel! \o/

  • The old wizard is still being used for onboarding while we do comparison tests with some variations. For example, we’re currently doing an experiment with importing embedded in about:welcome

  • We’ve been working on adding support for importing a subset of Chrome extensions into Firefox. This is currently disabled by default while we produce the mapping, but we’re hoping to do an experiment rolling this out to some users on Beta.

    • Thanks to tgiles and willdurand for all of their work here!

Picture-in-Picture

Search and Navigation

Below the fold


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,

kpatenio

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