These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 101

Highlights

• • We have begun to roll out fission to a fraction of users on the release channel! Here’s a reminder of what Fission is, and why it matters
    • Telemetry so far doesn’t show any problems with stability or performance. We’re keeping an eye on it.
  • Fluent milestone 1 is 100% completed! All DTDs have been removed from browser.xhtml!
    • • 
        • Caption: A burndown chart for strings in browser.xhtml. No remaining DTDs left.
  • A new group of students from Michigan State University are working on improvements to High Contrast Mode. See the High Contrast Mode section below for details. Thanks to Noah, Shao, Danielle, Avi, and Jack!
  • about:processes is a page that you can go to to see which Firefox processes are taking up power and memory on your machine
    • It’s now possible to record a performance profile for a process with only a single click from within about:processes!
    • Here’s an animated GIF demonstrating a example workflow of one-click profiling
  • The new tab redesign has officially graduated. The pref to enable the pre-89 design has been removed.
  • Experimental improvements to macOS video power consumption will land soon in bug 1653417.
    • Fullscreen Youtube video on macOS consumes only 80% of the power it otherwise would.
    • We’re looking for testers! Flip gfx.core-animation.specialize-video to test. We’re looking specifically for visual glitches in the video or its controls. We’d also like to confirm that power usage is reduced for fullscreen YouTube and Twitch videos.

Friends of the Firefox team

Introductions/Shout-outs

• • [mconley] Welcome Yasmin Shash and Hanna Jones!
  • [vchin] Welcome to Amir who has started as Desktop Integrations EM!

For contributions from September 8th to September 21st 2021, inclusive.

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

Fixed more than one bug

• • Antonin Loubiere
  • Itiel

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

• • ​​🌟 Colin Cazabet fixed a highlighting bug in devtools
  • 🌟 Shaoting Huang renamed a warning icon variable
  • ​​🌟 Noah Pesta removed default icon styles

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

WebExtensions Framework

• • Starting from Firefox 94, a new “ExtensionSchemas” profile marker is collected from the calls to Schemas.load (including the url to the JSONSchema file being loaded and if it has been loaded from file or startupCache) – Bug 1728245
    • • Example profiles from Bug 1728461 comment 21:
        • JSONSchema data loaded from file
        • JSONSchema data loaded from startupCache
  • Fixed multi-account-containers addon regression in Firefox 94 (related to the changes landed in 94 from Bug 1708243) – Bug 1729395

Downloads Panel

• • Katherine and Molly have been fixing a bunch of tests for enabling the downloads modal removal work in Nightly (currently behind the browser.download.improvements_to_download_panel pref)

Fluent

• • Milestone 1 has been completed! All DTDs have been removed from browser.xhtml!
    • As a bonus, this also means that all DTDs have been removed from the startup path, which was a goal for Milestone 2!
    • Are We Fluent Yet?
    • Congratulations to Katherine and Niklas for finally getting us over this milestone!

Form Autofill

• • Thanks to :emilio for making form autofill use a semi-transparent background-image rather than a filter
    • Using filter was causing absolutely positioned elements to disappear, such as credit card logos in this case
  • :tgiles fixed credit card preview and autofill not working as expected on fnac.com

High-Contrast Mode (MSU Capstone project)

• • Noah [:pestanoa] is ensuring that hovering over downloads panel icons are visible when HCM is enabled
  • Shao [:huangs50] is investigating that the checkbox’s focus outline in the “Edit Bookmarks” panel is visible for HCM
  • Danielle [:lamoure6] is looking into fixing contrast styling for the tabs bar buttons
  • Avi [:pasulaav] is looking into certificate error page buttons lacking contrast when hovered over

Lint, Docs and Workflow

• • Our ESLint mozilla/use-services rule now covers defineLazyServiceGetter(s) as well as Cc[].getService().
  • We’ve also just changed defineLazyScriptGetter, defineLazyServiceGetter and friends to allow passing of globalThis as well as this. This should allow use within es6 modules.

macOS Spotlight

• • Window spotlight buttons will now be on the correct side in RTL builds: bugs 1633860 & 1419375.
  • We noticed some users unfamiliar with macOS conventions were running Firefox directly from its DMG file. This can result in data loss and slow startup times, since Firefox is not fully installed. We now show a message warning the user in this scenario (bug 516362).

New Tab Page

• • New tab redesign has officially graduated. Old design pref & related code removed. Bug 1710937 👏
  • CSS variables simplified & cleanup. Allowing for easier theming (bug 1727319, 1726432, 1727321)
  • The ntp_text theme API property was broken, and now it isn’t! (bug 1713778)

Nimbus / Experiments

• • Bug 1730924 We want to update the Ajv JSON schema validator in tree

Password Manager

• • Serg fixed a UI issue that appeared in the “Import Complete” modal as part of the import logins through CSV flow

PDFs & Printing

• • Emily has a patch that adjusts the orientation depending on the page-size
  • Hanna cleaned up the margins error message to only show two decimal places Bug 1670871
  • Hanna disabled some animations that happened when prefers-reduced-motion was enabled in the print dialog Bug 1723989

Performance

• • Gijs has filed some bugs to make process flipping less likely when Fission is enabled
  • We’ve been seeing a slow but steady decline in the percentage of clients on Nightly seeing tab switch spinners. This might be related to Fission, WebRender, hardware churn, or might be a measurement artifact due to old builds sending telemetry. We’re not sure.
  • Thanks to jstutte for landing a patch that removes some main thread IO during startup when checking if we need to be doing an LMDB migration!

Performance Tools

• • Thanks to our contributor, mhansen, Linux perf profiles now include different colors for kernel vs user stack frames.

  • 

    Caption: Two side-by-side images of performance profiles. The right side now has bright colors

Proton

• • Lots of cleanup work done by MSU students over the hack weekend!
    • Noah [:pestanoa] removed default icon styles from info-pages.css’ .title class and is also working on updating the ID of the “Browser Tools” menubar item
    • Shao [:huangs50] renamed the –panel-banner-item-warning-icon-bgcolor variable
    • Danielle [:lamoure6] is removing the remaining -moz-proton media queries and its media query implementation
    • Jack [:yingjunj] is removing the last fragments of code manually checking the browser.proton.enabled pref
    • Avi [:pasulaav] is renaming the .small class to .small-button

Search and Navigation

• • Firefox Suggest is a new feature we’re working on to help you find the best of the web more quickly and easily!
  • Drew enabled the Firefox Suggest offline scenario for en-* users in the US region and made some tweaks to the Address Bar preferences UI
  • Daisuke fixed a regression where the Address Bar was not providing switch-tab results when history results were disabled – Bug 1477895

Screenshots

• • Niklas has a patch up to honor the screenshots.browser.component.enabled pref value for the screenshots shortcut
  • Niklas is also working on adding a screenshot of the current viewport to the new screenshots UI
  • Jared investigated a screenshots error with raw pages