Today’s meeting leader is: RyanVM

General Topics / Roundtable

• (Axel) The way we do non-localized Fluent files right now doesn’t work, see bug 1569892. Patches in flight.

Friends of the Firefox team

Introductions/Shout-Outs

• None this week.

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

Fixed more than one bug

• Armando Ferreira
• Arun Kumar Mohan
• Florens Verschelde :fvsch
• J
• jaril
• Krishnal Ciccolella

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

• 🌟 Apratim updated a string in about:telemetry to make the UI less confusing
• Armando Ferreira
  • Made it easier to select text in the Web Console on collapsed messages
  • Made it possible to copy the link location for Learn More links in the Web Console
  • Fixed a misleading tooltip in the Web Console
  • Added back / forward buttons to the Web Console when in multi-line editing mode in order to replace the more-troublesome keyboard cursor mechanism
• Alex R made it so that adding a breakpoint to a blackboxed source file in the Debugger un-blackboxes that file
• Bryan Kok [:transfusion] fixed a bug where the Screenshot DevTool would be broken after a page refresh
• 🌟 François Freitag made it so that the clear button on DateTime form inputs is hidden when the form field is required
• 🌟 Chris Muldoon simplified some of our widgetry markup
• 🌟 Dennis van der Schagt [:dennisschagt] fixed a SessionStore issue where the SameSite flag wasn’t correctly restored for session cookies
• Kevin Morehouse made it so that focusing the FindBar in the Debugger causes the current query to be fully selected
• 🌟 msirringhaus made the Unix backend for OSFile work correctly across more platform variations
• Krishnal Ciccolella
  • Made the text inside the Accessibility contrast badges unselectable
  • Made disabled breakpoints easier to identify in the Debugger
  • Increased the clickable area for the Event Breakpoint list
• Sonia polished the focused appearance of the conditional breakpoint input in the Debugger
• J re-organized some of the files in the Network Monitor codebase

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

• Extensions team now officially includes a zombie, you’ve been warned. Welcome aboard Tomislav!
• Shane fixed a bug wherein the private browsing access permission was not removed from an extension upgrading (or downgrading) to manifest.incognito: “not_allowed”
• Honza Bambas fixed a bug in the proxy API that prevented extensions from using DIRECT as a failover for proxies.
• Luca applied a small change to prevent installed devtools webextensions from initializing the devtools components before actually needed
• HTML about:addons
  • Mark is working with Emanuela on some tweaks to the styling of the HTML about:addons views
  • Tom Schuster changed the locale string related to the addon context menu action “More options” to “Manage”
• API notice: deprecated LWT theme aliases are going to be ignored starting from Firefox >= 70
• Rob fixed a host permissions issue with tabs.execute.

Applications

• Firefox Accounts
  • No updates.
• Sync and Storage
  • No updates.
• Push
  • No updates.

Browser Architecture

• [fluent] Fluent on startup path enabled! 🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉
  • First patch to test waters will land soon.

Developer Tools

• Debugger
  • Landed in Fx70: Variables and Scopes now remain expanded while stepping (see bug 1405402).
  • Landed in Fx70: There is now an overlay in the content page, similar to Chrome's, indicating when the debugger is paused and why (see bug 1354679).
  • In progress: working on a new DOM mutations breakpoint panel that will be shared in the debugger and the inspector.
  • Screenshot of the new pause overlay feature
• Console
  • The new Console Editor is progressing nicely: it now has a close button (see bug 1567370), can be resized as you would expect (see bug 1554877), will soon have history navigation buttons (see bug 1558198).
  • The entire console layout now uses CSS grid and subgrids (see bug 1565962) and it's awesome.
  • Screenshot of the in-progress console editor
• Layout tools
  • More work ongoing on a unified smart sidebar panel for the inspector. You can find the latest designs here: https://github.com/firefox-devtools/ux/issues/64#issuecomment-512650220
  • We now (Fx 70) have color-contrast checks in the color-picker tooltip thanks to Maliha (a11y intern). See bug 1478156.
  • Screenshot of the color-picker in the inspector, showing the new color contrast calculation
  • In-progress: color blindness simulation in the a11y panel (see bug 1564999), also thanks to Maliha.
  • Mockup of the simulation menu in the a11y panel (https://bug1564999.bmoattachments.org/attachment.cgi?id=9078853)
• Network
  • Heng Yeow is making good progress on the WebSocket panel (now enabled on Nightly - Bug 1564105 ), Florens added sent/received icons
  • Screenshot of the new websocket monitor panel
• Remote debugging
  • As of Fx 70 about:debugging is now the truly official way to connect to remote targets. The old "Connect" page as well as WebIDE have been removed. See this bug and this bug.

Fission

• Gijs updated the Plugin click-to-play code to be Fission-compatible. This also had the side-benefit of getting some more code out of the start-up path.
• mconley has a patch up to make RemotePrompt (prompt, alert, confirm, other dialogs) work with Fission
• Neil has a port of the FindBar almost ready - currently working on getting the modal FindBar code working with it.
• Neil has a local WIP patch to port the LoginManager to be Fission-ready
• Abdoulaye has written a test for subframe crashing (subframe crashing is currently broken, and this test will be enabled once it’s fixed)
  • In doing so, he’s added infrastructure to BrowserTestUtils to make it easier to write Fission-ready browser tests!
• Abdoulaye has a patch to make Fullscreen work with Fission
• Abdoulaye also has a patch to make AudioPlayback indicators for tabs Fission-compatible
• Abdoulaye also has a WIP patch to make audio/video controls work with Fission
• Tests with Fission-enabled are running on Ash (jobs ending with -fis). It’s pretty orange, but we’re making progress!
• M-fis (mochitests with Fission enabled) will soon (within a week or so) be running on central.

Lint

• There's now a Restructured Text linter for our documentation (rstcheck). This is being worked on by Shivam, a GSoC student.

New Tab Page

• Working towards launching remote layouts (DiscoveryStream) in 69.
• Working on new form of promo content to test in 70.
• Enabling Discovery Stream in 70 for en-CA and DE.
• Ongoing performance improvements and fixes.

Password Manager

• Management UI
  • Enable about:logins on Nightly and pre-release channels 🎉
  • Move Login Autofill checkbox out of old Password Manager modal </u>
  • Allow about:logins to use the Privileged About content process even if about:home isn't ready for that just yet </u>
  • RTL fixes
  • Update UI of breached login indicator </u>
  • Install on Mobile Device button in Ellipsis menu </u>
  • Lots of visual polish thanks to ntim!
• Password Generation
  • Make password field values visible when focused after a generated password is filled
  • Support cutting and copying from unmasked password fields </u>
    • Thanks to Masayuki for implementing the DOM/editor changes!
  • Don't offer generated passwords in private windows </u>
  • Auto-save used generated passwords as long as there isn't already a login with an empty username for the site. </u>
  • "View Saved Logins" and "Use a Securely Generated Password" can be truncated </u>
  • QA has started!

Performance

• aswan and florian noticed that AdBlock Plus causes us to initialize the DevTools code very early during start-up, and this was fixed very quickly by Luca Greco
• A slew of new start-up related bugs have been filed for testing and measuring
• Mandy also has a patch to stop computing the countryCode for the system too early during start-up, and move fetching it off of the main thread
• aswan got rid of some superfluous main-thread IO during start-up caused by the AddonManager
• mconley has figured out how to use a network proxy to record and replay network packets while during start-up frame recording tests. Hopefully this will reduce the noise from the tests.

Performance tools

• No updates.

Picture-in-Picture

• The Picture-in-Picture toggle no longer opens the player window for non-primary mouse clicks
• The Picture-in-Picture toggle now disappears after 2 seconds of no mouse activity
• Better support for multi-monitor setups has landed
• Better keyboard accessibility for the player window has landed
• Patch up to fix an issue with flickering video inside of the Picture-in-Picture player window
• Coming up next:
  • A keyboard shortcut for entering Picture-in-Picture
  • A context menu on the Picture-in-Picture toggle to turn it off
  • Hopefully, a compositor-driven mechanism for making the Picture-in-Picture toggle more reliable

Policy Engine

• Just bug fixing, no updates.

Privacy/Security

• We’re working on some of the cool new features coming in Skyline/Firefox 70
• We have a new identity UI with the insecure indicator for HTTP pages
  • Now also not marking localhost as insecure anymore
• The new protections panel is making some great progress, you can follow bug 1549618
• Check out the protection report on about:protections and file bugs against bug 1549805
• We are also working on an addition to ETP that will specifically help against tracking from social networking sites.
• Carolina and Danielle have been hard at work adding a new certificate viewer at about:certificate. Once bug 1567561 lands you can flip security.aboutcertificate.enabled and inspect certificates in a tab (with more information than before)!
  • It’s very much WIP right now, we’ll send out another email when things are ready for testing.
• Paul is churning through tricky evil traps bugs, such as Bug 1522120 - Exit fullscreen when a permission prompt is shown to the user
• Paul also improved our indicators for geolocation usage to include an in-use indicator and show when geolocation was last accessed by the site
• We successfully completed the no-eval-in-system-principal project!
  • Thank you very much to everyone who helped out

Search and Navigation

• Search
  • Fixed encoding of search engine parameters
• Quantum Bar
  • Modernized the urlbar layout by replacing the results popup with a box and inlining the markup in browser.xhtml
    • A few related regressions are being worked on
    • More legacy code removal
  • Fixed an annoying regression where bookmarks may be returned even if they are excluded in preferences
  • Fixed an annoying regression where some special characters (#, $, ...) may be stripped from the beginning or the end of the search string
  • Added new disabled-by-default event telemetry to analyze the results of future experiments

User Journey

• Progress on What’s New Panel (see meta bug) targeted for 70
• Improvements to the First Run onboarding experience, new targeting/triggers for the What’s new Page, and new Firefox Monitor snippet planned for 69 as the result of a recent work week
• Some new potential CFRs (Contextual Feature Recommendations) planned for sync, Firefox Send, Send Tab to Device, and Lockwise

This week I learned

• [gijs (read-only, PTO)] xpcshell tests may be running e10s… or not. Depends on whether `firefox-appdir = browser` is set in the manifest. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1568333 for details. Would be nice to make this less unpredictable!