Firefox/Meeting/12-Jan-2021

Today’s meeting leader is: dthayer

Friends of the Firefox team

Introductions/Shout-Outs

• [mconley] Welcome mhowell to the front-end team! She’s reporting to bwinton, and will be working on Proton-y things to start

Fixed more than one bug

• Michelle Goossens
• Oriol Brufau [:Oriol]
• Tim Nguyen :ntim

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

• <Will be filled out after the meeting>

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

Addon Manager & about:addons

• Thanks to emilio’s patch, starting from Firefox 86 the zoom levels for the extensions options pages embedded in the about:addons tabs should be set as expected - Bug 1398481.

WebExtensions Framework

• Sonia contributed a small but nice cleanup by removing the extensions.webextensions.tabhide.enabled preference. Thanks Sonia!
• Fixed a regression (introduced by Bug 1638422) related to making sure that webRequest StreamFilter is disconnected after a redirect - Bug 1683189
• Fixed crash in webRequests StreamFilter on view-source requests (Bug 1678734)

WebExtension APIs

• Allowed redirect URI to be set to a loopback address in the identity.launchWebAuthFlow API, needed to allow extension to successfully integrate oauth authentication for some common web services (e.g. google services) - Bug 1635344 (landed in Firefox 86, uplifted to 85, will also be uplifted to 78 ESR)

Developer Tools

• Error count button in the Toolbar - shows amount of errors on the current page.

601x182px

Screenshot online

• Performance fix for the Browser Console (bug)

• Planning

  • DevTools Fission M3 - Reaching Feature parity with pre-Fission state.

  • WebDriver BiDi - a standardization project to specify a bidirectional, automation-focused, protocol for the future.

Lint

• globalThis is now fully enabled for ESLint. Some support was previously enabled, but the definition for the global was missing.
• Whitespace linter now also fails for missing whitespace at the end of files.
• no-async-promise-executor is now enabled everywhere in the tree.
• Don't forget: There's a "Lint and Formatting" ([#lint:mozilla.org]) channel on Matrix for all your lint and formatting questions.

New Tab Page

• New personalization for sponsored content just went to nightly, and is having a rollout for 84/85.

  • This version mostly differs from the old one by building a topic based interest profile instead of matching domains.

Password Manager

• (read only unless someone else can take it, :sfoster has a conflict)
• Thanks for Kenrick85 for their continued contributions, recently landing bug 1579108 to fix alignment in the about:logins item/edit form layout.

• Dlee and tgiles have been cleaning up about:logins with a series of patches landed:

  • Bug 1678633 - A blank page is wrongly displayed on the “about:logins” page after signing out from Firefox Sync and checking the option to delete all data

  • Bug 1679131 - Remove all confirmation modal - icon and close button icons can be dragged

  • Bug 1683615 - about:logins - in-page focus jumps on the meatball menu when navigating by keyboard

• Thanks :dao for fixing Bug 1683678 - Mask password button is no longer visible if Light theme is used

PDFs & Printing

• emalysz added a checkbox to print the selection if there is one Bug 1670122
• dholbert added support for pages-per-sheet values of 2 and 6 Bug 1669905

Performance

• bigiri, emalysz, and masterwayz are continuing to remove OS.File usage from the startup path and have collectively posted patches for ClientID.jsm, Sqlite.jsm, SharedDataMap.jsm, SessionWorker.jsm, PageThumbs.jsm, XPIProvider.jsm, and DownloadIntegration.jsm

  • Thanks to gijs and barret for all the reviews!

• dthayer enabled the skeleton UI on nightly! https://youtu.be/k-IZSU7jG0o
• emalysz worked on rtl support for the skeleton UI
• mconley completed an analysis on the performance impact of using built-in fonts for proton
• gijs fixed a toolbar flicker bug
• gijs continues to investigate the DOM size for potential performance wins
• dthayer propagated annotations from the BHR ping through the processing job and worked with florian to display annotation information in his BHR exploration tool

Performance Tools

• Added a delete button on the profile viewer page. You can find it inside the popup on the top right corner if you uploaded that profile.

375x222px
Delete confirmation popup while deleting the profile

• Now you can see the proportion of nursery-allocated strings that were deduplicated on the GC Minor markers thanks to sfink.

415x215px
A GCMinor marker tooltip that includes the proportion of nursery-allocated strings that were deduplicated.

• Improved accessibility in the network chart.

Picture-in-Picture

• We have a new set of students from MSU starting soon! mhowell and mtigley will be mentoring them. This is the metabug for their work.

Proton

• Watch this space! Proton is a UI refresh effort that’s just starting to get off of the ground. Expect stylistic and content changes to the toolbars, menus, tabs, etc.
• Here’s the metabug. All work will fold under it. And here’s the wiki page.
• There’s a browser.proton.enabled pref, but it’s early days, so this doesn’t do anything right now. As Proton-associated changes land, they’ll be keyed off of this pref.
• Some things we think we can start working on and landing sooner, so we’re working on that as designs are solidified.

Search and Navigation

• Fixed a performance problem when a very long search history entry was suggested. Bug 1682434
• Fixed a race condition where pressing ESC may not always exit search mode. Bug 1677325
• Fixed a bug causing Bookmarks, Tabs, History buttons to disappear from Search Preferences when restoring defaults. Bug 1681818
• Removed most browser.urlbar.update2.* prefs in Firefox 86, a few were left for features that are still under exam. Bug 1665049