Firefox/Meeting/27-June-2023
Contents
The Firefox Unleashed - These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 141
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
âThis 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.â
niklas landed a brand new Picture-in-Picture control: a 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
- 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 shouldnât 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.
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 (đ = first patch)
- đ Matt Moldenhauer adjusted CSS to position icon in about firefox window
Project Updates
Add-ons / Web Extensions
Addon Manager & about:addons
- As part of the follow-up work for the Quarantined Domains feature, users will be able to exempt specific extensions from the restrictions in Firefox 116 - Bug 1839393, Bug 1838230, Bug 1838232
- As part of the Browser Migration Wizard, we implemented a mechanism to import extensions from other browsers (currently, only Chrome is supported) - Bug 1838431, Bug 1838464, Bug 1838465, Bug 1839830, Bug 1840352
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
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)
Alex is continuing his quest to improve the debugger codebase and make it faster (bug, bug, bug, bug, bug)
showing the preview popup is 7% faster (perfherder alert)
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
- 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, weâre currently doing an experiment with importing embedded in about:welcome
Weâve 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 weâre 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
- niklas also fixed an issue where the PiP controls are misaligned on the PiP window for wide videos
- niklas cleaned up some existing css rules
- kpatenio fixed the PiP mute button not working for YouTube Shorts
- Dale enabled Rich Suggestions on Nightly
- Drew added the ability for Nimbus experiments to override suggestion scores.
- Marc Seibert replaced direct access of the urlbar input value with proxies.
- Karandeep fixed an issue with the Urlbar where on a Mac using shift+up/shift+down for text selection fail would move up/down in the list of suggestions instead of modify the selected text area.
- Karandeep also fixed an issue where one-off search engines removed via the tick could be reactivated when changing browser-language.
- Dale fixed an issue where adding the Goodreads Search Engine and using it would return a blank page.
- Daisuke fixed an issue whereby selecting a tab, the address bar text being selected would be inconsistent based on whether the previous tab was on a loaded page or a new tab.
- Daisuke also fixed an issue where using QuickActions with the same url could result in either seeing no QuickActions or only View Page Source would be shown.
- Mark Banner fixed an issue where enrolling in a search experiment with invalid values would result in SearchService not initializing.
Below the fold
mconley, mhowell, fchasen and niklas are this monthâs Firefox / Toolkit :: General triagers
Next month is: Mossop, DJ, Cieara, Negin
- [mak - read-only cause in a work week] - mozStorage (Sqlite) threads are now named after the database file name (e.g. âsqldb:places.sqlite #1â), rather than being all named âmozStorage ##â. This should be visible both on crash-stats and the profiler. If your database name may contain sensitive data (an origin for example) you should use openDatabaseWithFileURL and pass a custom telemetryName - (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1638256)
[mconley] The way we import modules can sometimes result in reported leaks