Firefox/Meeting/16-Nov-2021

General Topics / Roundtable

• [mconley] Firefox::General triage! Interested in seeing the process? You can join the audience this Thursday, November 18th from 1PM - 1:30PM ET. Zoom link. There’ll be another one on Thursday, November 25th from 1PM - 1:45PM ET at the same link.

Friends of the Firefox team

Introductions/Shout-Outs

• A big thank you to all the Outreachy applicants who applied for this cycle.
• We had 38 applicants with approximately 110 contributions between them.
• Welcome Mandy Cheang [:mcheang] to the Search team!

For contributions from November 2nd to November 16th 2021, inclusive.

Fixed more than one bug

• Clinton
• Evgenia Kotovich
• John Bieling (:TbSync)
• Jonas Jenwald [:Snuffleupagus]
• raquelvargas@gmail.com

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

WebExtensions Framework

• Emilio fixed a bug that was preventing users to interact with browserAction popups using touch screens - Bug 1696786 (regressed in Firefox 86 by enabling APZ in popups loading a document in a child process, Bug 1493208)
• Fixed a bug in the child processes initialization, which was preventing the permissions to be correctly transmitted from the parent to the child process once a non-http/https blob url is created and new processes spawned - Bug 1738713
  • NOTE: technically this wasn’t an extension-specific issue, but it was easy enough to trigger by extensions using the “browser.contentScripts.register” API method and so it happened to be reported to us as a WebExtensions issue
• As part of the ongoing work related to the “Manifest Version 3 background service worker”, we have landed some more changes to notify the WebExtensions internals when a background service worker is being spawned, loaded and destroyed - Bug 1728326 (still only enabled on Nightly along with other parts of the “MV3 background service workers” internals)

WebExtension APIs

• June Wilde introduced a new “browser.privacy.network.globalPrivacyControl” read-only setting, which will allow extensions to observe the Global Privacy Control status in Firefox >= 95 - Bug 1735372

Fission

• [mconley] Fission rollout to release is underway! Going smoothly so far. We aim to have Fission enabled for about half of the release population next week sometime. If all goes well, it’ll be enabled for all of our release population by the end of the month!

Fluent

• [mconley] flod has written up some excellent documentation on localization best practices that we should all check out.
• Juicy tidbit: did you know that “Save document?” in English becomes “A bheil thu airson an sgrìobhainn a shàbhaladh” in Gaelic? So be careful with static dimensions for things containing text!
  • [jaws] Wow! The “accented” pseudo locale wouldn’t expand this text enough in the worst case

Form Autofill

•  :dimi fixed a race condition in autocomplete and form autofill that kept causing issues in the GeckoView autocomplete tests
•  :tgiles fixed the credit card cardholder name not being recognized on amazon.de due to a missing heuristic

High-Contrast Mode (MSU Capstone project)

• Danielle added a blue/accent colour to checkboxes in HCM
• Noah is investigating an HCM issue on Windows 7: context menu items aren’t visible when hovered/selected
• Is also looking into fixing a test failure resulting from a Picture-in-Picture fix he made
• Avi is working on a MacOS issue where the focus ring isn’t visible around the edit bookmark panel’s “Save” button

Desktop Integrations (Installer & Updater )

• Firefox MSIX package released to the Microsoft store 🎉🎉🎉🎉
• Major a11y performance regression for MSIX installations fixed (thanks Jamie!)

Lint, Docs and Workflow

• ChromeUtils.import second argument removal (needed for switching to es6 modules as backstage pass is not available):
• Raquel fixed the enterprise policy code, and some test files under browser/.
• OS.File removals:
• (see performance section)

Password Manager

•  :dimi added the ability to identify high-value sites using password-related heuristics so that sites can be isolated on Android Fission
•  :dimi fixed an autofill issue where Firefox was autofilling into a spam detection/honeypot field on certain sites
•  :sgalich is working on the highly requested feature of being able to regenerate passwords in the autocomplete dropdown

PDFs & Printing

• Bug 35228 - Antonin added support for printing even/odd pages
• Filed April 2000 🤯

Performance

• emilio has a nice optimization that avoids creating some DOM structures for panels during window creation and startup.
• Lots of work has been happening to get rid of OS.File usage, like:
• raquelvargas removing OS.File usage from various browser tests!
• emcminn removing OS.File usage from the RemoteL10n module!
• onuohaoluebube05 removing OS.File usage from various SessionStore tests!
• barret is back from leave, and is filing bugs for tricky IOUtils situations.

Performance Tools

• Reading big profiler buffers to capture a profile is now dramatically faster, thanks to Gerald’s work!

Screenshots

• Ongoing work to develop a browser component version of Screenshots
• Nbaumgardner fixed Bug 1649915 - Screenshots saved as larger JPG instead of smaller PNG
• Thanks for cpeterson for fixing Bug 1739563 - Replace screenshots' makeUuid.js with crypto.randomUUID()

Community

• [mconley] Some great contributions to Picture-in-Picture from volunteers, including:
• Falguni Islam fixed an issue where sometimes the wrong window was being focused when unpip’ing a player window
• shirshak fixed an issue where controls wouldn’t easily hide after fullscreening a PiP player window