Firefox/Meeting/27-Aug-2019

Today’s meeting leader is: johannh

General Topics / Roundtable

• [standard8] Firefox source docs site has had the top-level rearranged slightly. Now all browser/ docs are under the Firefox section.
• [mconley] We have a new Fission-compatible replacement for ContentTask.spawn - SpecialPowers.spawn. The main differences being that it can target OOP subframes, can run in test content scripts, and that the arguments must be passed as an Array. Documentation here, and some tests demonstrating its usage.

Friends of the Firefox team

Introductions/Shout-Outs

• [mconley] Emma Malysz was an intern last summer who worked on XBL removal, and has returned to join us full time! She started last week in SF.

Fixed more than one bug

• Arun Kumar Mohan
• Dennis van der Schagt [:dennisschagt]
• Dhyey Thakore [:dhyey35]
• Florens Verschelde :fvsch
• Heng Yeow (:tanhengyeow)
• Itiel
• Krishnal Ciccolella
• Megha [ :meghaaa ]
• Priyank Singh

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

• Alex R. fixed a bug where the conditional / logpoint input field in the DevTools Debugger would collapse and not be able to come back
• Chris Muldoon fixed a visual glitch where sometimes the inspector icon would overlap the close icon in the Watch Expression list of the DevTools Debugger
• 🌟 Anurag Aggarwal brought the Responsive Design Mode input field borders in-line with the Photon design guidelines
• 🌟 Megha [ :meghaaa ] got rid of a chunk of dead code, removed an unnecessary variable from the Page Info dialog, and updated some of our tests to use the global waitForCondition utility!
• Priyank Singh made it so that long study names are properly displayed in about:studies, and also cleaned up some of our autocomplete-richlistitem custom element markup
• ruthra[:ruthra] eliminated some main-thread IO that the search service was doing during start-up!
• Krishnal Ciccolella made it so that variable tooltips in the DevTools Debugger have a height limit, and also updated the Scopes panel in the DevTools Debugger to use a monospace font
• singuliere improved our dynamically registered Telemetry Event support

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

• Haik Aftandilian fixed a regression related to the macOS Notarization/Hardened Runtime that prevented Adobe Acrobat WebExtensions from working correctly on Catalina(macOs) Beta version because of a missing com.apple.security.automation.apple-events entitlement
• Luca fixed a bug that was preventing Firefox from being able to remove the temporary xpi files for the installed extensions on Windows, and a couple of followup fixes related to the Abuse Reporting feature (Bug 1574431 and Bug 1572173)
• Shane landed the initial version of the Extension’s ActivityLogging privileged API (which allows a privileged extension to monitor the activity of the other installed extensions)
• Privileged extensions can now access the HttpTrafficAnalyzer urlClassification as part of the details received by the webRequest event listeners
• Mark fixed a regression in the screen reader accessibility of the new HTML about:addons views, and also applied some other improvements to the new HTML about:addons views (Bug 1557175, Bug 1560155)
• Tom Schuster enabled the downloads API to set the Referer header
• The about:addons shortcut management view is now notifying users when there extensions are using the same shortcuts. Thanks to Trishul for contributing this enhancement.

465x230px Warnings on conflicting extension shortcuts (screenshot link)

• Firefox can now inspect Extensions storage.local data from the Addon Debugging DevTools storage panel (a feature request tracked by a[1]3+ years old meta bug), thanks a lot to Bianca Danforth for working on this feature! (the feature is currently locked behind the devtools.storage.extensionStorage.enabled pref, we invite you to give the feature a try in a recent Nighty build by flipping the pref and provide us your feedback)

473x126px Inspecting storage.local data on an installed extension (screenshot link)

Applications

• Firefox Accounts

  • No updates.

• Sync and Storage

  • No updates.

• Push

  • No updates.

Browser Architecture

• No updates.

Developer Tools

(Screenshots will be replaced by links after the meeting)

Debugger

• DOM Mutation Breakpoints - this features allows the user to pause JS execution when DOM structure changes (Subtree/attribute modification or node removal). It’s now available behind a flag and ready for testing. You need to flip the two following prefs to enable it:

  • devtools.debugger.features.dom-mutation-breakpoints devtools.markup.mutationBreakpoints.enabled

298x268px Screenshot link

298x224px Screenshot link

• Inline Previews - showing actual variable values inline. This feature is also available behind a flag and ready for testing. You need to flip the following pref to enable it:

  • Devtools.debugger.features.inline-preview

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Note the inline boxes showing actual variable values

Screenshot link

• Disable debugger; statement - It is now possible to disable a debugger statement via a false-conditional breakpoint created at the same location (bug).

Network

• WebSocket Inspection (GSoC project) - This feature is enabled on Nightly by default (devtools.netmonitor.features.webSockets)

  • Supported protocols Socket.IO, SockJS, plain JSON (and MQTT soon)

  • WS frames Filtering supported (by type & by free text)

  • A test page

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Screenshot link

• Heads Up: Search across all files/cookies/headers in the Network panel coming soon! (Outreachy)

Perf Tools

• JavaScript Allocations - tracking for JS allocations added. It's still experimental but you can enable it by checking "JS Allocations" in recording panel feature flags

  • (Example profile: https://perfht.ml/301avXy)

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Screenshot link

Accessibility Panel

• A new option to auto-scroll to the selected node in the panel tree [Yura]

• The UI was re-organized a bit [Yura]

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Screenshot link

Fission

• You can now run mochitest locally with Fission-enabled using --enable-fission.
• Work to get tests working with Fission-enabled is proceeding well. Here’s a spreadsheet with a graph.
• Neil is very close to getting the LoginManager and Autocomplete code ported over to be Fission-compatible
• emalysz has a patch up to port the Page Info dialog to be Fission-compatible

• Abdoulaye got the following chunks of work done:

  • Landed a test for crashing subframes

  • Made the tab audio indicators / muting work with Fission

  • Made HTML5 form validation code work with Fission

  • Helped get <select> dropdowns working in RDM again

  • Improved some of our Fission documentation

• Thank you to Abdoulaye for a great job during his internship!

Lint

• ESLint has been updated to 6.1.0 (from 5.16.0). This helped us with a few things:

  • Running --fix over the entire tree should now work for pretty much everything that's auto-fixable. Previously it would stop working at the `js/` directories, and then you'd have to run it manually on the remaining sub-directories (e.g. services, toolkit etc etc).

  • If you have an /* global foo */ statement for ESLint and foo is unused, it will now throw an error.

  • There's also now a new rule enabled on most of the tree: no-async-promise-executor. This aims to avoid issues with having asynchronous functions within new Promise()

• ESLint will also be upgraded to 6.2.2 within the next couple of days. The main addition here is support for BigInt and dynamic imports.

New Tab Page

• 69 we’re launching “Discovery Stream” which is a newtab experience with more pocket content. We’re doing this with a rollout on Sept 10th.
• Trying to ensure 70 is good to go, we want to run some revenue experiments in 70 for promo content, which requires some new features.

Password Manager

• Management UI

  • Footer advertising links to Lockwise mobile apps

  • Set a maxVersion of 69 for Lockwise extension and update the description to tell users the feature is built-in now

  • Now displaying HTTP auth realms in about:logins and autocomplete

  • Enable breach alerts in about:logins for all releases

  • Loading about:logins during session restore now shows all logins as expected

  • Various design tweaks

  • (Bugzilla query for all bugs fixed in the last two weeks)

• Password Generation

  • Don't autoupdate the generated password when the generated password has been deleted

  • Merge logins if a user adds an existing username to a generated password in the doorhanger

    • Update _generatedPasswordsByPrincipalOrigin when merging and deleting logins

  • Hide the Fill Password/Login context menu on about: pages

Performance

• A new Talos test is being added to measure warm start-up times with a number of popular real-world add-ons installed
• dthayer and mconley met with rhelmer about trying to do more work behind-the-scenes in the stub installer before launching the first browser window to improve perceived startup time
• Mandy has a patch up to avoid doing more main-thread IO during start-up, and also has her eyes set on one other bug before her internship closes out

• dthayer has a prototype where the content process is launched really early during Firefox start-up with a static about:newtab page

  • Initial measurements are encouraging. We’re going to take more measurement to build our confidence and then see how we can go about making this happen.

• Florian has a prototype of a tool that distills BHR (Background Hang Reporter) data to give us a sense of where we’re dropping the ball for responsiveness
• Gijs is trying to avoid some main-thread IO during start-up caused by our plugins code. The fact that Flash is now click-to-play by default makes this a bit easier.
• mconley disabled the Privileged About Content Process for about:home, since it’s been held to Nightly for long enough without riding, and it’s better to test what we ship.
• mconley finished off aswan’s patch to make Firefox Monitor a built-in browser component
• emalysz has a WIP patch up for review to make some more Telemetry stuff lazier, and avoid mainthread IO during start-up.
• Thank you to Mandy for all her excellent work during her internship!

Performance Tools

• No update this week

Picture-in-Picture

• A preference has been added to about:preferences to control the Picture-in-Picture video toggle
• A context menu has been added to the Picture-in-Picture video toggle to make it easier to hide
• The VIDEO_PLAY_TIME_MS Telemetry probe has been revived so we can measure whether or not there’s a correlation between users who use Picture-in-Picture, and the amount of video they watch.
• We’ve settled on a keyboard shortcut (Ctrl-Shift-) for initializing Picture-in-Picture for the first available video in the focused window]
• Fixed a bug where some videos are displayed with strange padding in the Picture-in-Picture player window

Policy Engine (read only)

• No updates

Privacy/Security

• A big shout out to Carolina and Danielle, our Outreachy interns who built a new certificate viewer. Their internship ended a week ago, but we hope to be able to ship their project in Firefox 71. It’s in Nightly right now.

  • Metabug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1553524

• Constant improvements on the protection panel and protection report as project Skyline comes closer to shipping
• We enabled Social Tracking Protection by default in Nightly and are shipping on 70.
• We announced that we’re moving the EV indicators out of the URL bar.
• The lock icon is now grey.

• Steven enabled fingerprinting protection by default in all channels.

  • Cryptomining is already shipping with 69.

• Cryptoming and Fingerprinting protections are now available as enterprise policies

• jkt sent out an intent to unship for AppCache

  • We’ll be slowly and carefully phasing it out

• We shipped an intervention for the Kazakh Government MitM, along with other major browsers.

  • Plans for better MitM response mechanisms with customized error messages: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1569357

• Based on recent experiment data we updated the notification permission doorhanger to “Never Allow” by default.

Search and Navigation

• Search

  • Work continues on modernising the search configuration.

  • Work has also started on allowing users to define a separate search engine to use in private browsing mode.

• Quantum Bar

  • Work continues on the “megabar” redesign

  • Simplified one-off buttons design landed

  • The TopSites experiment (use new tab page sites list as the empty search result) is close to be ready for deployment. First experiment running on Quantum Bar.

User Journey

• Lots of work around messaging for Skyline to increase Firefox Accounts

  • What’s New panel with tracking protection block counts

  • Protections Panel and additional teams building on CFR, e.g., password save trigger, social tracking protection

  • Uplifted to 69 beta: Moments page, New Monitor snippet, Extended Triplets

This week I learned

• [johannh] I forgot: pbz added a new module for testing permissions (PermissionTestUtils), that you should use

  • [MattN] Permission manager test* APIs don’t currently check OriginAttributes