Today’s meeting leader is: mtigley

General Topics / Roundtable

• [mconley] There’s some kind of JIRA migration occurring on Sunday. For any Bugzilla bugs that are tied to JIRA somehow, we’ve been asked to avoid touching those on Sunday until the migration completes. Migration window is 5 am PT/8am ET/12 pm UTC until 9 pm PT/12 am ET/4 am UTC

Friends of the Firefox team

For contributions from June 1 to June 15 2021, inclusive.

Introductions/Shout-Outs

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

Fixed more than one bug

• Andrey Bienkowski
• Ava Katushka
• jha.ashray12
• Kajal Sah
• Michelle Goossens

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

• 🌟 Cerkiewny alphabetically reordered case statements in aboutLogins.js
• 🌟 afrehner.work fixed a DevTools issue where custom properties that begin with numbers are shown as invalid
• alej0hio2007 added support for dark mode in about:debugging
• Ava Katushka made it so launching a download with a computer application is saved to directly to the Downloads folder and also wrote a test for downloads telemetry
• Claudia Batista [:claubatista] added a fix that prevents DevTools from crashing when Host Header is not available
• jha.ashray12 fixed an issue where params text would be empty in the Network Request side panel
• Silke Hofmann refactored our remaining code to stop using “xlink:href” and instead use just “href”

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

• Sonia Singla contributed a patch to remove the about:config preference “extensions.allowPrivateBrowsingByDefault” (it has been introduced as a fallback mechanism to return to the older behavior, during the transition to the user-controlled extension permission to selectively allow extensions to run in private windows) - Bug 1661517

• As part of the work to support “Manifest Version 3 extensions”, an initial chunk of the work to expose the WebExtensions APIs to the extensions’ “background service worker” has been landed in Nightly 91 (locked behind a pref that can only be enabled in nightly builds) - Bug 1682632

  • Bug 1682632 does not expose yet any actual extensions APIs to the background service workers, an initial set of APIs (browser.alarms, browser.runtime and browser.tests) are part of the follow up Bug 1688040

  • For an high level view of the plans related to “Manifest Version 3 extensions” support, follows the blogpost we recently published on the “Mozilla Add-ons Blog”: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2021/05/27/manifest-v3-update/

Developer Tools

Downloads Panel

• Outreachy intern, Ava, has landed the following:

  • A change where downloads opened with a computer application through the “What should Firefox do with this file?” prompt are directly saved to the Downloads folder (bug 1710933). This was already the behavior on macOS, and now Windows and Linux do this too if the browser.download.improvements_to_download_panel preference is set to true.

  • Test for basic functionality of downloads telemetry (bug 1712997)

• In-progress:

  • Ava is working on making “Save to disk” the default decision for downloading files (bug 171094). She’s already written a patch. This change is also behind the browser.download.improvements_to_download_panel.

  • Ava has started investigating how frequently we should be opening the downloads panel (perhaps with an option to opt-out?) (bug 1709129)

macOS Spotlight

• Improved dark mode support is now enabled in Nightly and Early Beta! When Firefox is in dark mode, look out for:

  • Dark Library/Page Info windows

  • Dark tooltips

  • Dark text selection colors in UI chrome

  • Dark autocomplete popups (login autofill, etc)

  • Dark window styling, including dark stoplight buttons and the elimination of the dreaded white line at the top of dark windows

  • If you notice things that don’t look right, please file bugs blocking Bug 1623686.

• Work continues on native fullscreen support.
• Work continues on reducing power consumption during video playback.
• We’re looking into reports that Firefox is triggering memory pressure warnings, especially on M1 Macs.

New Tab Page

• Upcoming (Firefox 90) Private Browsing NTP experiment to promote Mozilla VPN with 3 different design variations bug 1715504

Nimbus / Experiments

• Working on a wrapper API to allow cpp/platform clients to use the Nimbus API bug 1716560

NodeJS

• Node 10 -> Node 12 upgrade expected to land today (Tuesday, June 15th)

  • https://groups.google.com/u/1/a/mozilla.org/g/dev-platform/c/x6Ag-Cus1UA has more details

  • Most developers shouldn’t need to do anything.

  • A followup post will be sent after the landing with details for the few folks who may wish to verify that everything is still working for them.

Password Manager

• Dimi landed support for multi-page login forms! Bug 1708455

  • Password manager will now:

    • Detect username only forms
    • Support autofill, autocomplete, and context menu in these username only forms
    • Support login capture when users submit the multi page form with the password

• Tgiles landed an improved password generation experience by utilizing Apple’s password rules data! Bug 1686071

  • Now when users generate passwords on sites that have an entry in the “password-rules” dataset, we will generate a stronger and more accurate password based on site requirements!

  • Note: we currently do not have Apple’s password rules data pulled into Firefox so the improved password generation experience is not noticeable yet. The data should be pulled in within the next week or two.

PDFs & Printing

• No updates

Performance

• Hang stats! Did you just add new code that runs on the main thread? Our BHR (Background Hang Reporter) system can help you detect if it’s causing hangs for our users in the wild. You can view the latest hang data here!

  • Notice those handy annotations on the right-hand side when selecting a hang? Those help give a sense of what might have been happening during the hang. Want to add your own? Adding BHR annotations is as easy as adding Telemetry!

• mconley landed patches to make it possible to control the about:home startup cache via Nimbus

  • The goal is to do a Nimbus experiment to see how the cache impacts user behaviour on Beta and (maybe) Release

Performance Tools

• Screenshots are now visible while selecting a time range.

Smaller versions of the screenshots are visible while selecting a range

• Profiler rust API for thread registration has been landed now. If you are working on a Rust project with multiple threads, don’t forget to register your threads with the Gecko Profiler. It’s pretty straightforward with gecko_profiler::register_thread and gecko_profiler::unregister_thread endpoints. More Rust API endpoints for the profiler coming soon!

Privacy/Security

• As announced on dev-platform, we’ve deployed a tool to auto-update third-party libraries in Firefox automatically. Contact @jewilde or @tjr to help set up yours!

  • Example bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1712411

Proton/MR1

• mconley landed sentence casing for the AppMenu
• mconley is working on some cleanup bugs, trying to pay down some tech and UI debt
• mhowell and Gijs are heading up a project to burn down the proton-cleanups bugs, and to land some Proton-y things that didn’t make the first cut

Search and Navigation

• Harry fixed a problem with a synced preference causing some address bar results to not appear anymore - Bug 1715484
• Harry is doing some re-architecture work to split the old unified address bar provider into separate providers, that will give us better separation of concerns and control over results composition - Bug 1677126, Bug 1662167, Bug 1712352
• Harry reduced the padding around search shortcut buttons in the address bar - Bug 1712775
• Daisuke corrected cut text glyphs on address bar results - Bug 1565448
• Daisuke fixed a problem with the focus ring briefly appearing on the address bar when clicking its border - Bug 1708263
• Daisuke converted the separate search bar shortcut buttons to compact mode, like in the address bar - Bug 1709405
• Drew is working on improvements to address bar results flexibility - Bug 1713322

Screenshots

• Kajal added a screenshot option to context menus when clicking on an iframe
• Kajal fixed a bug with “Save visible” not capturing the viewport
• Kajal is working on a patch to fix a bug with the disable notification for the screenshots toolbarbutton and is starting to port screenshots into a dedicated browser component by creating a preference

This week I learned