Firefox/Meeting/19-May-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 Installer & Updater
- 3.10 Lint
- 3.11 New Tab Page
- 3.12 NodeJS
- 3.13 Password Manager
- 3.14 PDFs & Printing
- 3.15 Performance
- 3.16 Performance Tools
- 3.17 Picture-in-Picture
- 3.18 Privacy/Security
- 3.19 Remote Protocol (Chrome DevTools Protocol subset)
- 3.20 Search and Navigation
- 3.21 User Journey
General Topics / Roundtable
- [jaws] Add a password for this Zoom meeting?
Friends of the Firefox team
Introductions/Shout-Outs
Resolved bugs (excluding employees)
Fixed more than one bug
- Andrew Swan [:aswan]
- Farooq AR
- Itiel
- Martin Stránský [:stransky]
- Etienne Bruines
New contributors (🌟 = first patch)
- <Will be filled in after the meeting>
Project Updates
Accessibility
Add-ons / Web Extensions
Addon Manager & about:addons
- Andrew Swan contributed the changes needed to handle updates for built-in extensions (the one bundled into the omni.ja) Bug 1571876, which was also a blocker for completing the migration of some system addons into built-in (e.g. Screenshots as part of bug 1568270), and another change to avoid checking the blocklist for built-in and system addons (Bug 1633396), which is likely helpful to avoid some additional work during the startup 🎉🎉🎉
WebExtensions Framework
- Fixed a regression in Firefox 76 related to the runtime.onConnect API event (Bug 1635637), the regression has been reported on bugzilla for Amazon Assistant extension (but it was likely going to affect some other extension), thanks to Tomislav for quicking working on a fix (and Rob for helping on quickly investigating the reasons behind the regression).
- :baku fixed a regression that was going to break “Reddit Enhancement Suite” in Firefox 77 (Bug 1635490)
- Fixed a regression in Firefox 78, related to the webRequest event listeners, that was likely going to affect Adblock Plus (Bug 1638581). Fixing this regression did also fix Bug 1638476 (related to the new “blocking by extension” feature part of the devtools network panel)
WebExtension APIs
- Additional parts of the new rust-based browser.storage.sync backend landed in the last two weeks (Bug 1623245, Bug 1634191, Bug 1637169, Bug 1635688, Bug 1637165), Thanks to the markh and lina!
Contributions:
The new browser.tabs.goForward and browser.tabs.goBack API methods are now also supported on GeckoView / Fenix (Bug 1633328). Thanks Atique for contributing this new API on both Firefox Desktop and GeckoView!
Browser.downloads.download does now remember the most recently used directory when the API call does also use the “saveAs: true” option (Bug 1395207). Thanks to Mark Smith for contributing this enhancement!
Applications
Firefox Accounts
Sync and Storage
Push
Developer Tools
- Console panel - You should be able to inspect thrown expressions, regardless of their type (bug)
- Console panel - Unhandled rejected promise now have a proper callstack attached (bug)
- Console panel - On Nightly you can inspect an error object in the sidebar (bug)
- Debugger panel - map scopes for Logpoints (bug)
- About:debugging - See/change remote URL from about:devtools-toolbox (bug)
- Network panel - drag and block (bug)
- Network panel - Showing request rejected by CORS
- Network panel - Showing name of the related Add-on for for blocked resources (e.g. uBlock, Adblock Plus, etc.) bug
- Network Panel - Headers panel facelift (better summary info + expandable URL & query arguments inspection) bug
- Fission - Call for Fission feedback (+ RDM shipped to DevEdition)
Fission
Installer & Updater
Lint
- Kwan landed a set of patches to ensure that we don't throw bare `Components.results` items in Javascript, instead ensuring they are wrapped in `Components.Exception`.
New Tab Page
(non verbal) Nothing new, just moving along with this nightly plan
Some l10n work to “sponsored by” tag for other languages.
(experiment) New card treatment for stories that link to videos.
(experiment) Moving popular topics element a bit up the page.
NodeJS
Password Manager
Disable the OS authentication prompt from about:logins due to abnormally high failure rate (Fx76 and Fx77). One reason was:
Some users are confused about which password/PIN to enter in the OS re-auth dialog from about:logins - new Windows dialog strings
- We will do a study in Fx77 with the new strings (along with bug 1631879) to see how much they improved the success rate of authenticating. UX will also make a recommendation for next steps when they are finished with another project.
- Remember that a Windows accounts has no password to limit future failed authentication attempts
- Allow user to remove the saved login/password from the doorhanger when being asked to update it
488x312px
(Login update doorhanger with a dropdown on the secondary action to “Remove Saved Login”) - Fix login autocomplete when a field’s parent is a Shadow Root
- Update new password heuristics model to version 4.0 in order to bring password generation to even more websites.
- Seeing a 4x increase in passwords generated vs. page loads without a saved login:
479x290px
(Graph of # of password generated divided by proportion of page loads without a filled password)
PDFs & Printing
- Opening PDFs from Firefox's download panel should open the PDF within Firefox
- Firefox opens infinite tabs when set as the OS default file handler for PDFs
- pdfs with content-type application/octet-stream are downloaded without confirmation, even though Preview in Firefox is enabled
Should be able to view PDFs even if the response HTTP headers include Content-Disposition:attachment
Labeling of default app handling in preferences is confusing for PDF files
Performance
- bigiri working on running the snippets code entirely within the content process.
- emalysz has a patch in review which shows a consistent 25% improvement in startup times on Windows reference hardware by changing the list of DLLs we preload during startup:
- florian landed work to exit(0) at the end of mochitests on opt builds, saving infra time.
- Gijs and emalysz landed several patches to lazily insert panels and popups into the DOM only as needed.
- dthayer is working on patches to eliminate omnijar reads during typical startups by expanding the scope of the startup cache, allowing us to avoid IO and lazily open omnijar files.
- emalysz is experimenting to see if we can decrease the shutdown terminator’s timeout setting without substantially increasing overall shutdown hangs, with the hope of limiting time spent waiting for a hung shutdown (for instance, during OS shutdown).
Performance Tools
- No updates this week.
Picture-in-Picture
- No updates this week.
Privacy/Security
Remote Protocol (Chrome DevTools Protocol subset)
- Contributor Etienne Bruines implemented offline mode for Network.emulateNetworkConditions to allow testing frameworks to verify the correct offline behavior for web applications. Thanks, Etienne!
- The Runtime.executionContextCreated and Runtime.executionContextDestroyed events are now correctly emitted when subframes are created and destroyed. To not break users of Puppeteer while further work for frames needs to be landed, both events are temporarily put behind the `remote.frames.enabled` preference, and not sent out by default.
- The Network.requestWillBeSent event has been updated to include request headers and document URL.
- The Network.responseReceived event is available now. Some data about the response, such as security state, will be implemented later.
- loaderId of document request is now included in Page.lifecycleEvent
Search
-
We have just finished landing a set of patches for integrating our partner distribution engines into the configuration. This allows us to manage these in a better way and reduces the amount of special code for distributions.
-
Region.jsm has now landed, work is under way to move the SearchService region handling across to it.
Next up will be moving other consumers of the region preference to use the jsm.
Cleaning up the search service
With modernisation now almost shipping, the next steps will be to start a late spring clean on the search service. This is mainly aimed at cleaning up the startup code and handling of configuration changes, though other areas will be included as well.
Address Bar
- the address bar can now recognize custom domain suffixes using browser.fixup.domainsuffixwhitelist.yoursuffix (.test, .example, .invalid, .localhost, .internal, .local are set by default) - Bug 1634650
- Search suggestions are now highlighted differently, only non typed words and tail of typed words are highlighted - Bug 1636696
The team continues working on improving results matching and composition, a few things we’re currently looking into:
historical and tail search suggestions
experiments about new search experience
more consistent search or visit heuristic when typing
Improved autofill and scoring
User Journey
- Multi stage about:welcome, bug 1629671
- *** Doc
