Firefox/Meeting/22-Sep-2020
Today’s meeting leader is: dthayer
Contents
- 1 General Topics / Roundtable
- 2 Friends of the Firefox team
- 3 Project Updates
- 3.1 Accessibility
- 3.2 Add-ons / Web Extensions
- 3.3 Applications
- 3.4 Firefox Accounts
- 3.5 Sync and Storage
- 3.6 Push
- 3.7 Developer Tools
- 3.8 Fission
- 3.9 Form Autofill
- 3.10 Installer & Updater
- 3.11 Lint
- 3.12 New Tab Page
- 3.13 NodeJS
- 3.14 Password Manager
- 3.15 PDFs & Printing
- 3.16 Performance
- 3.17 Performance Tools
- 3.18 Picture-in-Picture
- 3.19 Privacy/Security
- 3.20 Remote Protocol (Chrome DevTools Protocol subset)
- 3.21 Search and Navigation
- 3.22 User Journey
- 3.23 WebRTC UI
- 4 This week I learned
General Topics / Roundtable
- [bgrins] testing policy (https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/testing/testing-policy/)
Friends of the Firefox team
Introductions/Shout-Outs
Resolved bugs (excluding employees)
Fixed more than one bug
- Chris Jackson
- Kriyszig
- Michael Goossens
- Reid Shinabarker
New contributors (🌟 = first patch)
- 🌟 Tanner Drake made sure that we always respect the browser.search.openintab pref.
- 🌟 Ben D (:rockingskier) implemented STOMP WebSocket message parsing.
- 🌟 Chris Jackson, 🌟 Hunter Jones, 🌟 Reid Shinabarker, and 🌟 Manish Rajendran fixed many Picture-in-Picture bugs! See this issue’s PiP section for details.
Project Updates
Accessibility
Add-ons / Web Extensions
Addon Manager & about:addons
Changes to the Add-on Manager to support the Promoted Add-ons pilot program have been landed in Firefox 82, in particular to:
show in about:addons the new “Verified” and “Line extension” badges (Bug 1657476)
allow “Verified”, “Recommended” and “Line” extensions to be hosted on third party websites (Bug 1659530)
WebExtension APIs
- Agi fixed a regression on tabs.capureVisibleTab when used on GeckoView (Bug 1664522, originally regressed by Bug 1636508)
- The topSites API will now provide the ActivityStream top sites icons as data URIs (Bug 1662654, changes needed to unblock Bug 1654258)
Michael Goossens contributed a couple of nice enhancements to the browse.tabs and browser.webRequest WebExtensions APIs and fixed a small bug in the browser.test WebExtensions API, thanks Michael!
Bug 1662329 - Drop cookie permission requirement for receiving the cookieStoreId property as part of the tab details, cookieStoreId is the tab property that allow an extension to know if a tab is a container tab
Bug 1654833 - Improve error message when webRequest event listener is passed an invalid `urls` value
Bug 1664725 - Getting expecting rejection to match gets <unknown> instead of actual expectation, this fixes a small old regression in the browser.test WebExtensions API, the API is not available outside of the testing environment but this is still a nice fix because it make sure that those test failure are going to contain more useful details about the assertion that did fail.
Applications
Firefox Accounts
Sync and Storage
Push
Developer Tools
Shipping Server Sent Events (SSE) Inspector - Server-Sent Events (SSE) is a server push technology enabling a client to receive automatic updates from a server via HTTP connection (mdn). The SSE Inspector is part of the existing Network Panel in DevTools reusing the user interface for inspecting WebSockets.
Contributed by a student (former GSoC candidate)
DevTools Fission M2
Working on main architecture changes and adopting panel by panel.
Focusing on testing (preparation for the Fission Nightly experiment, Oct 9)
Marionette Fission
Main infrastructure changes landed, focusing on individual commands now.
Fission
- The next milestone M6b has 29 remaining bugs. The most significant remaining change remaining is moving most of the session history to the parent process rather than each child. The current plan is to enable this for M6b. You can try it out by enabling the 'fission.sessionHistoryInParent' preference along with ‘fission.autostart’ preference and report any bugs related to bug 1656208.
- A fission nightly experiment will be launched soon in early October.
- In early October, Fission will also be available as an opt-in feature in about:preferences for Nightly only.
- If you find any Fission bugs, please report them under the meta fission-dogfooding. The Fission team appreciates your help. :-)
Form Autofill
Installer & Updater
- [read-only] Bytesized is taking on the long-standing update related papercut known as the staged updates bug (353804). When this happens, you may see Firefox update...only to be prompted to update immediately again afterwards. The work is still in planning stages (see details here) and will apply to partial updates only. Currently targeting FX 84.
- [read-only] Nalexander is adding attribution support for macOS (1619353) which is targeting FX 83.
Lint
- No updates this week
New Tab Page
On save recs (not really newtab, maybe need a section for Pocket integration into Firefox?)
When you save a page you now see 3 similar articles.
Looks like this
203x253pxTo enable this, set extensions.pocket.onSaveRecs to true, and restart.
No experiment for this, we see this as an enhancement, just doing some design tweaks and feedback before turning it on by default.
If you try it and have feedback, you can ping @thecount in #pocket-questions slack.
NodeJS
Password Manager
- Change password manager tests to not use a fixed hostname
- Some password manager tests fail intermittently because the 'passwordmgr-processed-form' notification is delayed.
- The Ellipsis menu is wrongly dismissed when clicking inside it
- In progress: Update password manager recipes from a server/kinto/Remote Settings
PDFs & Printing
- 82 printing go/no-go decision to be made today
Looking at potential blockers for 82
Some users are seeing long dialog loading times
Some users are seeing incorrect page sizes where the page is very small
Custom margins can no longer be set, adding support for them
Occasional preview errors when opening the dialog as the page is loading
Performance
- bigiri has continued working on the ASRouter refactor and is down to just a few remaining broken tests
- dthayer fixed a bug in sccache and landed his patches that draw a skeleton UI during Windows startup, which you can enable by setting the pref “browser.startup.preXulSkeletonUI” to true (currently only works on Windows with the default Firefox theme)
- emalysz has been working on migrating the page action strings to fluent and lazifying the page action menu
- gijs fixed pgo file writing to ensure we collect profiling data from non-webcontent child processes
- gijs has been investigating different ways we can reduce the DOM size
- mconley, gijs, florian, dthayer, and esmyth met to discuss the future of BHR, which the team will be working on next month
Performance Tools
- No updates this week.
Picture-in-Picture
MSU students this semester are:
Hunter (:whjones)
Niklas (:nikbaumgardner)
Chris (:chrisj)
Reid (:rshinabarker)
Manish (:manishr)
- Hack weekend was a success! Much was learned, things were fixed.
Fixed
Bug 1599376 - Picture-in-Picture window can not be opened using the keyboard shortcut on macOS
Bug 1599803 - Factor out repeated logic in Picture-in-Picture tests
Bug 1603234 - Picture-in-Picture close button is on the wrong side on macOS
Bug 1617135 - If PiP is in focus the keyboard combination CTRL+SHIFT+ doesn't work for closing the frame.]
Underway
Bug 1589680 - Make it possible to have more than one Picture-in-Picture window
- This is just going to be experimental to start. We’re not yet sure if there’s a real use case here to support, but we want to prototype it.
Bug 1604247 - Provide an easy way to snap a PiP window back to a corner after moving it elsewhere
Bug 1612648 - Picture in picture icon overlay overlaps mute tab
Bug 1578985 - Picture-in-Picture does not remember location and size of the popout windows
Bug 1653496 - Picture-in-Picture option not shown for VideoHTMLElement with VideoTrack from Twilio
- Fixing this should re-enable PiP capabilities on MediaStream videos
- In-tree documentation was added
- Keyboard shortcuts in the player for seeking and controlling audio are set to ride out in Firefox 83
Privacy/Security
Remote Protocol (Chrome DevTools Protocol subset)
Search:
- Separate private browsing engine feature (Nightly-only) has been disabled, while we figure out its destiny - Bug 1665301
Cleanup the search service after config modernization - Bug 1619922
The work completed, any remaining changes will be handled as usual bug fixes.
Consolidation of aliases and search keywords - Bug 1650874
UX working on a restyle of search preferences
Address Bar:
Urlbar Update 2
Release moved to Firefox 83, including both search shortcuts and tab to search.
Lots of fixes and polish for the search shortcuts functionality (Bug 1659204, Bug 1662477, Bug 1657801, Bug 1658624, Bug1660778, ...)
One-off buttons support key modifiers - CTRL/CMD to immediately search in new tab, SHIFT for the current tab (override search mode) - Bug 1657212
User Journey
- Homepage remediation CFR now visually redirects to the restored home page
- Adjust Alpenglow theme background for borders and button placement
- Configuration option to show importable site names on about:welcome
- Directly migrate passwords without wizard UI for single profile browsers
WebRTC UI
- New indicator has slipped again. Thankfully, we seem to have converged on a design that we think we can ship by default, so hopefully that will ride out in 83!
mconley is adding Notification Area icons to show device sharing state on Windows
This nearly made it in before the soft freeze, but got stymied by an unexpected shutdown leak, which mconley is now investigating.
This week I learned
Meeting Leader Rotation
Add your name below if you want to be in the rotation of leaders:
- lina
- harry
- dthayer
- jaws
- mconley
- emalysz
- K88hudson