Highlights

Browsing your stored logins in Lockwise is now easier with a new ability to reverse alphabetical sort the stored logins.

The changes to extension sideloading that we announced back in October have landed!

Starting in Firefox 74, the preference to allow running extensions with embedded experimental APIs has been renamed from extensions.legacy.enabled to the more explicit extensions.experiments.enabled If you need your WebExtension to use experimental APIs, then you’ll need to flip this preference.

The urlClassification property in the webRequest API, which classifies URLs into groups such as “tracking”, “cryptomining”, etc. is now available to all extensions (Bug 1589494)

Eager evaluation (aka Instant Evaluation) is now available on Nightly for DevTools! Check out the Console panel. Caption: Instant evaluation is showing the result (preview) of the current expression yet before it’s evaluated (i.e. the Enter key pressed). Selection changes in the autocomplete popup count too There is also an option that can be used to control the feature



Friends of the Firefox team

Introductions/Shout-Outs

Introducing Bernard Igiri!

Fixed more than one bug

Alex Henrie

Andrew Swan [:aswan]

Andy Bruère [:abruere]

Florens Verschelde :fvsch

Itiel

Logan Smyth [:loganfsmyth]

Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]

Pranav pandey

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

The new contributors list is especially long this post because it contains new contributors since the last post went out!

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

Addon Manager & about:addons

Mark removed some old workarounds from about:addons (Bug 1610622, Bug 1565235) and fixed some issue related to the options page (Bug 1610227) and about:addons “categories sidebar” (Bug 1609069)

Extensions keyboard shortcuts can now be removed from the about:addons “manage shortcuts” view (Bug 1520119, and Bug 1475043 to allow the extensions themselves to unset a shortcut using browser.commands.update(…))

WebExtensions Framework

As part of the changes needed to fully adapt the WebExtensions internals to Fission, Tomislav ported the nativeApp messaging internals from MessageManager to the JSWindowActor based messaging (Bug 1602639)

Shane made sure that the manifest property content_security.isolated_world is aliased to content_security.content_scripts to improve Chrome compatibility of the changes to the extensions CSP (Bug 1594232)

is aliased to to improve Chrome compatibility of the changes to the extensions CSP (Bug 1594232) Starting from Firefox 74 (Bug 1502525), the preference “extensions.webextensions.remote” (which makes the extension pages to run in a separate process when set to true) is now only being read once (which is useful to prevent unexpected behaviors when the preference is flipped at runtime)

(which makes the extension pages to run in a separate process when set to true) (which is useful to prevent unexpected behaviors when the preference is flipped at runtime) The urlClassification property included in webRequest and proxy events details is now part of the public API available to all the extensions (Bug 1589494)

Fixed regressions

In Bug 1608373 Andrea fixed a “browser.proxy.settings.get/set” regression that was affecting non-privileged extensions that use the proxy.settings API (regression originally introduced in Bug 1593651)

regression that was affecting non-privileged extensions that use the proxy.settings API (regression originally introduced in Bug 1593651) The changes introduced by Bug 1405971 – Webextension UUID leak via Fetch requests have been backed out to fix some regressions due to setting the Origin header to null on the HTTP requests originated by an extension page (some regressions related to this issue are tracked by: Bug 1607154 and mozilla/fxa#3857)

Other bugs fixed thanks to our contributors

atiqueahmedziad fixed the userScripts API schema (Bug 1605403)

fixed the userScripts API schema (Bug 1605403) myeongjun.ko fixed a bug in the storage.sync API (Bug 1561584)

fixed a bug in the storage.sync API (Bug 1561584) aji.yash13 fixed a theme API bug (Bug 1592831)

Developer Tools

Autoclose brackets – The Console panel input now respects the Autoclose brackets option. Console automatically inserts the corresponding closing element for quotes & brackets (bug)

The Console panel input now respects the Autoclose brackets option. Console automatically inserts the corresponding for quotes & brackets (bug) A new InactiveCSS warning landed. This one will let you know when one of the top, right, bottom, left and z-index properties are being used on a non-positioned element (bug)

Check out the Rules side panel in the Inspector panel

The New Application panel is now enabled by default(in Nightly (only). Feel free to play with it if you have manifests and service works in your apps and report any issues you find here.

Next steps include doing a UI review of this new panel and showing all workers for registrations.

WebSocket Inspector supports WAMP protocol, including JSON, MsgPack and CBOR (bug)

Available in the Network panel

Fission

mconley made the PopupBlocker Fission-compatible

bigiri has an in-progress patch posted that migrates UnselectedTabHover to JSWindowActors

Neil finished view source

New Tab Page

Discovery Stream enabled for rest of world in 73.

New stories recommendation updates available but preffed off in 74, going to run experiments with it.

Working on content collections for newtab stories experiment in newtab for 75. It’s a way to group similar stories based on a certain topic for a set amount of time, examples, if we wanted stories related to privacy, or entertainment, we could group them, or if we wanted to respond to something time based.

In 75 adding some prefs to enable stories in new locales, so we can run experiments on this before going live, initially this is going to be for the UK. Right now US, CA and DE see stories.

NodeJS

We are changing the minimum required version of NodeJS for Firefox builds from 8 to 10 Node 10 is the oldest Long Term Support version of Node that is still live. It was chosen (rather than Node 12) because we want to cause minimum disruption for older distributions still building modern versions of Firefox.

After this happens (I’ll post in the usual places), folks will need to execute `mach bootstrap` in order to get the updated NodeJS bits installed into ~/.mozbuild

Probably shouldn’t cause any problems, but if anything acts weird, feel free to contact dmosedale@mozilla.com or ask in #NodeJS on Slack

Performance

Performance Tools

Recent profiler talks/workshops: Beginner workshop (Berlin all hands) Advanced workshop (Berlin all hands) FOSDEM talk (video is linked from this page) Berlin Lightning talks – skip to chapter 9 for ‘new features of the profiler’ and chapter 10 for an introduction to ‘memory tooling’.



Picture-in-Picture

Search

Search configuration modernization Hoping to turn it on soon, currently looking at performance figures.



Address Bar

User Journey