Firefox/Meeting/15-Apr-2025

General Topics / Roundtable

Addon Manager & about:addons

Allow developers to more easily test the add-on update flow from about:addons thanks to a new hidden pref named "extensions.webextensions.prefer-update-over-install-for-existing-addon", which changes the behavior of the “Install Add-on From File…” menu item (Bug 1956540)

WebExtension APIs

Support for “tab groups”-related features have been added to the existing tabs API (landed in Nightly 139 and uplifted to Beta 138)
Localized string using the i18n WebExtensions API will cascade through locale subtags to find translations before falling back to the extension's default language (Bug 1381580
- Thanks to Carlos for contributing this enhancement to the i18n API 🎉
A new text-to-audio task type has been added to the trialML API to allow extensions to use the Xenova/speecht5_tts model for text to speech tasks (Bug 1959146).

Abdelaziz Mokhnache made the new Netmonitor path column sortable (#1957554)
Joel fixed duration of incomplete requests in Netmonitor, will no longer show "0 mn" (#1953387)
Holger Benl made editing logpoint/breakpoint condition actually taken into account (#1944500)
Alexandre Poirot [:ochameau] fixed an issue where pausing in the Debugger wouldn't scroll the paused location into view (#1953394)
Hubert Boma Manilla (:bomsy) updated links to MDN as some pages were moved (#1953851)
Nicolas Chevobbe fixed an issue where editing input in markup view could lose focus (#1955040)

Thanks to Dan who improved an internal helper to stop returning closed Browsing Contexts.
To support the installation of unsigned web extensions, the WebDriver BiDi command webExtension.install has been updated to install extensions temporarily by default. A permanent installation is still possible by setting the vendor-prefixed parameter moz:permanent to true.
EventUtils has been updated to support an asyncEnabled flag on the aEvent argument across all method variants that synthesize wheel scroll events for DOMWindowUtils. This enables sending asynchronous "widget" events, which will soon be used by Marionette and WebDriver BiDi to dispatch events through APZ in the parent process.
Sasha added an API to BrowsingContext class to override the geolocation coordinates and new "emulation.setGeolocationOverride" WebDriver BiDi command, which utilizes the new BrowsingContext method under the hood.
The webdriver crate version 0.52.0, as shipped with geckodriver 0.36.0, didn’t allow direct consumers of this crate to construct a NewSessionParameters type. This has been fixed in the newly released version 0.53.0.

jdescottes fixed our ESLint ignores where the paths contain target (we were excluding too much).
Standard8 fixed the no-browser-refs-in-toolkit rule to handle moz-src:

We’re on track to perform our first train-hop experiment next month. We’ll be train-hopping a newer revision of the New Tab code to 138 release. That revision of the New Tab code will only have one change - a version increase.
- Due to how the Taskcluster configs and Ship It tool currently work, the train-hopping New Tab code is currently hosted on GitHub, but we should be able to keep everything in mozilla-central when this bug is fixed
Nathan fixed a bug where custom wallpapers were being reset after restart
Scott fixed a bug where the text colour of the page would be incorrect with custom wallpapers when the personalization panel was opened
Nathan fixed some visual issues when displaying publisher favicons
- You can test publisher favicons by setting browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.discoverystream.publisherFavicon.enabled to true
Special thanks to Ricardo Delgado Gomez, who fixed a visual glitch in our cards when images fail to load!
mconley has patches up to pull in strings from firefox-l10n when building newtab as an XPI
pdahiya has some WIP patches for runtime Glean metric and ping registration
Maxx has a patch up for an experiment to remind users of our Firefox mobile applications on the New Tab page
Reem has been refining and adding tests for reporting content on the New Tab page that people aren’t interested in

Profiling xpcshell tests locally just became easier, ./mach test <path to xpcshell test> -–profiler will open a profile of the test at the end.

We're currently in 138 beta with no open blockers 😅
Rollout update:
- Rolled out to 90% of 138 Beta (with 10% holdback) via Nimbus. Data in the experiment dashboard (Looker required) and our profiles Beta dashboard (STMO account required) looks good so far.
- Next up, 0.5% rollout in 138 release.
139 is a catchup / blocker uplift / bugfix release. Main focus is making the cross-profile shared database and cross-instance notifier code independent of the profiles feature, to support Nimbus and OMC storing cross-profile data there even if the profiles feature isn't enabled (metabug 1953861).
Recently fixed bugs:
- Jared fixed bug 1957924, ensuring the profile group ID gets correctly set across a profile group if a user disables, then re-enables data collection
- Jared fixed bug 1958196, fixing visibility issues in profiles using the System Theme after an OS theme change
- Niklas fixed bug 1956111, App menu back button hover coloring is incorrect in HCM
- Teddy fixed bug 1941576, Profile manager: Subcopy missing from "Open" checkox
- Teddy fixed bug 1956350, Limit theme chip labels to one truncated line
- Sammy fixed bug 1957767, When account is disconnected, cannot log back into profile
- Dave fixed some expiring probes in bugs 1958163 and 1958171

Dao fixed the toolbar contact menu being shown on address bar results @ 1957448
Drew fixed several bugs relating to sponsored suggestions @ 1955360 + 1955257 + 1958038 + 1958421
James has been fixing TypeScript definitions across multiple files @ 1958104 + 1958102 + 1958640
Moritz implemented a patch to reset Search settings when they are corrupt instead of just failing @ 1945178
Daisuke fixed the unified search button being persisted incorrectly @ 1957630
Moritz fixed quickactions not being shown after tab switch @ 1958878

Jules created a new color palette and all of the colors are now available in the design tokens (not just the ones that are being used already 🎉)
- You can check out the Colors section of the Tokens Table in Storybook
- Grays were not updated in this, that is being done in another bug
We’re playing with the idea of being called the “Acorn Engineering”/”Design System Engineering” team so if you see that it’s still recomp :)