Full Speed Into The Future - These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 142

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Mike Conley

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Jul 14, 2023, 10:19:17 AM7/14/23
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Hello firefox-dev,

Earlier this week, the Firefox Desktop team got together to share updates, pool notes, and let each other know what's been going on in the code. A few of us stuck around afterwards to turn the meeting notes into something more palatable for reading and perusing. Enjoy!

Special thanks to Niklas Baumgardner and Katherine Patenio who put these notes together with me.

Highlights

  • Firefox 115 was released last week! Firefox 115 ESR also went out, which is the last release series that Mozilla will be supporting for Windows 7 and 8 as well as macOS 10.12, 10.13 and 10.14. Users on those operating systems will automatically move to the ESR channel if they’re using release or beta. Mozilla will continue providing security updates for those users on ESR until at least September 2024.

  • As part of the second iteration on the Quarantined Domains project for WebExtensions, we’ve updated the SUMO page to (1) describe the motivations behind the feature and (2) mention the per-addon user controllable exemption, which will be available to users starting in Firefox 116.

    • We also improved the accessibility of the radio buttons in the addon card detail view (mainly for screen readers) - Bug 1839629

  • We appear to have closed the gap on the Speedometer benchmark compared to Chrome! Big strides and improvements for Firefox since May, whereas Chrome has been fairly static. Source.

    • [Screenshot]

      • Caption: A graph showing the Speedometer benchmark comparing Firefox, Chromium and Chrome.

        The graph is inverted, with higher scores appearing lower in the graph. Higher scores are better, therefore appearing lower in the graph is better.

        The top of the graph shows Chromium at around the 120 mark, with a slight change for the worse towards the end of June at around 110.

        The middle of the graph shows Firefox, rapidly closing in on Chrome, moving from ~150 to ~170, with it fully converging with the Chrome score around July 6th 2023.

        The bottom fo the graph shows Chrome fairly steady between ~165 and ~170.

  • Are you a web developer and want more control over things that get displayed in the console? Thanks to Sebo for adding documentation for Custom Formatters (bug)! Now you can, for example, display dates in the console like this:

    • [Screenshot]

      • Caption: The Console of the Firefox Desktop developer tools is shown. It's showing that a date has been logged, but the date is formatted to break out the year, month, day, hour, minutes and seconds.

  • The Firefox DevTools team has entered the Fediverse with an official account on mozilla.social!

  • In Firefox View, sfoster has made it so that the “recently closed tabs” list shows tabs across all opened windows. Previously, the recently-closed tab menus would only list tabs closed from the current window. Clicking to restore a tab will re-open it into the current window.

  • We’ve improved our Picture-in-Picture compatibility on certain sites:


Friends of the Firefox team

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

Volunteers that fixed more than one bug

  • Devesh Bisen 

  • Ganna 

  • Gregory Pappas [:gregp] 

  • Itiel 

  • Jonas Jenwald [:Snuffleupagus] 

  • Sebastian Zartner [:sebo]

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

Addon Manager & about:addons

  • Some more changes have been landed as part of the “Chrome extensions import” project, in time to be included in Firefox 116 along with the rest of the changes introduced to the AddonManager internals in support of this feature:

    • A message bar in going to be shown in about:addons while the imported addon have been staged but still pending full installation - Bug 1838466

    • Staged imported extensions will be fully installed after a browser restart when the user didn’t allow the staged extensions to be fully installed before shutting down Firefox - Bug 1840352

  • Thanks to annhermy (Ganna) for contributing a fix for Bug 1754401 (related to the “Report Abuse” dialog intermittently missing padding at the bottom of the dialog)

  • Thanks to Richard Marti for fixing an about:addons regression in Thunderbird (Bug 1840086), and Niklas for following up to apply the proper longer term fix (Bug 1838041)

    • NOTE: the regression was due to the FiveStarRating reusable webcomponent – defined at toolkit-level – which was referencing a fluent file only available in desktop builds.

Developer Tools

DevTools

  • Alex is still deep into cleaning up the Debugger codebase in order to make it faster and support unload breakpoint (bug, bug, bug, bug, bug, bug, bug, bug, bug)

  • Hubert made the Netmonitor indicate if a request was resolved with DNS over HTTPS (DoH) (bug)

    • [Screenshot]

      • Caption: The "Headers" pane in the Network Monitor of the Firefox Desktop developer tools. It's showing a list of properties of a network request, including that the DNS Resolution occurred over DNS over HTTPS.

  • Nicolas landed a few patches to make sure the inspector works as expected with CSS nesting  (bug, bug, bug, bug, bug, bug, bug)

  • Nicolas enabled the compatibility tooltip everywhere (was Nightly only for a couple of release) (bug)

  • Julian modified HAR export so URL are set as title in the page entries (instead of the page title) (bug)

WebDriver BiDi

  • Henrik fixed a bug which prevented to correctly serialize shadow roots in some scenarios (bug)

  • Sasha implemented the browser.close command (bug)

ESMification status

  • Approx 1 year since we started.

  • ESMified status:

    • browser: 85%

    • toolkit: 99%

    • Total:  94.64% (up from 94.42%)

  • #esmification on Matrix

Information Management

  • Changes to how Recently Closed Tabs work have started to land. This is a series of changes to how these menus work to better align with people’s intuitive understanding of what "recently closed" should mean as observed in our user testing.

    • The web-extension `session` API is unchanged. This already consolidated the closed tabs from all open windows into one list. And the notion of a "current" window is tricky in this context, so restoring a tab via the API will continue to re-open it into the window it was closed from.

Migration Improvements

  • The new migration wizard was enabled by default in Firefox 115 (except for startup / onboarding migration). We’re still running an experiment on embedding the wizard during onboarding to test how successful users are in using it.

  • The extensions migration capability has uplifted to Beta (Firefox 116). It’s currently disabled behind browser.migrate.chrome.extensions.enabled while we experiment with it.

    • Since the last meeting, we also beefed up our automated testing for extensions migration.

  • CSV passwords (and by extension, Safari password) import can now be controlled via Nimbus. We’re going to be experimenting with this on the release channel at some point. Thanks to the Credential Management team for collaborating with us on this one!

  • We took the opportunity to do some refactoring and cleanup now that the new wizard has mostly stabilised.

  • We added a telemetry probe to measure how long it takes to reach the first page of both the legacy and new migration wizard.

  • We made the new migration wizard more resilient and timely when one of the other browser profiles contains a corrupted or malformed database.

  • For device migration, UX is working on finalizing updated copy for the current SUMO page to guide people through moving their data to a new device.

Picture-in-Picture

Search and Navigation

During our most recent sprint, the search and URL bar team worked on a bug bashing effort we called “Dragon Slayer”. Many of the following bugs were fixed as part of this effort. If you and your team are interested in learning more about our dragon slayer sprint, please reach out to Chris Bellini.


  • Dão fixed a bug where the URL bar had been losing its formatting when a user dragged an empty new tab to a separate window

  • Stephanie fixed a performance bug where pasting a long string into the URL bar was causing jank

  • Dale fixed a Quick Actions bug related to the wraparound behavior of Quick Actions buttons in the URL bar results pane when a window is narrow

  • Marco fixed a bug so that we now allow more time for the URL bar heuristic results to be returned. This fixed a heuristic provider timeout issue, which was sometimes causing unexpected searches

  • Now that Rich Suggestions has landed in Nightly, Dale fixed some bugs related to the feature: 1835695, 1840486

  • Jonathan Kingston, a software engineer at Duck Duck Go, contributed a patch to update DDG favicons to match the company’s new branding

  • Drew has landed a significant number of patches related to Pocket suggestions appearing in the URL bar: 1837097, 1841295, 1841354, 1841408, 1841409, 1841442, 1841446, 1841447

  • Daisuke also landed a Pocket Suggestions patch, one that hides the “show less frequently” option for high-confidence matches

  • Dão landed a patch that fixes an intermittent test verify failure in one of the URL bar mochitests

  • James landed a patch that enables the SERP telemetry improvements in Nightly

  • James also landed a patch that furthers the removal of the Top Sites feature

  • Mandy landed a patch that removes all code related to an autofilling search engines feature

  • Dão fixed a bug where the Go button would sometimes disappear when switching tabs. (The Go button is an arrow that appears on the right hand side of the URL bar as you’re entering text.)

Storybook/Reusable Components

Below the fold

  • General triage

  • Regarding Win 7 / 8 / older macOS support:

    • From RyanVM: macOS <10.15 code is safe to remove from m-c now. HOWEVER, Win 7-8.1 code removal is currently blocked on some CI work that needs to happen before we can prevent Firefox from launching on those systems, so please hold off on that for now. We’ll let you know when all’s clear!


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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