Highlights

We’re running experiments to reduce annoying permission prompts in Firefox

The DevTools team is bringing back Print Simulation! The bug to add it back into the inspector has landed last week!

The Font Editor now supports editing letter-spacing too



The Web Console now groups content blocking messages, if you flip the devtools.webconsole.groupWarningMessages pref. Much easier to read the output!

pref. Much easier to read the output! The new remote debugging is ON in Nightly now. Check out about:debugging to see the new experience! An “Intent to unship” notice for WebIDE and the Connect dialog has been sent.

The Oxidation of Firefox Sync continues, with the team writing new components in Rust! 🦀

Firefox Front-end Performance Update #16 posted, highlighting some performance improvements that are going out in Firefox 67

We enabled the FIDO U2F API in Nightly, targeting an uplift to Firefox 67

Access to the logins list from the entry points not tied to a specific website (about:preferences and the main menu) has nearly doubled in the week-and-a-half since adding the main menu item.

Access from a page context (filtered to show logins for that domain) has grown over 50x in just two days since enabling the autocomplete footer!

Friends of the Firefox team

Here’s a list of all resolved bugs by volunteers

Fixed more than one bug

Carolina Jimenez Gomez

Dhyey Thakore [:dhyey35]

Hemakshi Sachdev [:hemakshis]

Ian Moody [:Kwan] (UTC+0)

Martin Stránský [:stransky]

Mellina Y.

PhoenixAbhishek

Suriyaa Sundararuban [:suriyaa]

Trishul

Yuan Cheng

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

Project Updates

Activity Stream

The Activity Stream team is transitioning ownership of about:newtab and about:home to Pocket until Firefox 70.

We’re also expanding the Firefox Messaging System from Activity Stream Router and Contextual Feature Recommendations.

Improved code coverage by including JSX files, and approaching 100% coverage for JSMs.

Discovery Stream

For Firefox 68, the team is focusing on feature parity with Activity Stream Added Save to Pocket and Bookmark context menu items Basic personalization with existing domain affinity

Optimizing performance by loading images lazily, as the page will show many more

Add-ons / Web Extensions

Applications

Firefox Accounts

All FxA projects have been consolidated into a monorepo, to make developing and deploying easier. Check out this post from the team for more info 🎪

Vlad integrated the new device pairing flow into the Android Reference Browser! 📱

Sync

Developer Tools

Layout Tools Starting to work on Inactive CSS. This lets users see when CSS declarations are valid but do not have any effect on the page (bug, mockup #1 “how inactive CSS declarations look in the inspector” , mockup #2 “example of tooltips telling users why a declaration is inactive” ). Coming soon: Making CSS warnings in the console more useful. That means, e.g., not emitting warnings for vendor-prefixed properties when corresponding unprefixed properties exist. Or linking warnings to DOM nodes in the inspector. Thanks to jdescottes, nchevobbe and emilio for working on the platform support.

Debugger Uplifting several fixes for column breakpoints and windowless workers. Column Breakpoints are pretty solid now. As always, please keep an eye out for issues and report any if needed. Most of the team is busy with general debugger quality issues they’ve prioritized.

Console Clicking on a location in the console now opens the debugger at the expected column (thanks Mellina (yogmel), bug). Switch `devtools.webconsole.input.autocomplete` if you want to turn autocompletion off entirely (thanks Dhruvi, bug).

Fission Platform work on this requires the DevTools toolbox to be loaded via `<iframe type=”content”/>`. This means the toolbox document is slightly more “sandboxed” into its frame. This unblocks Fission, which is good! (see bug and bug).



Fission

Mobile

Firefox for Android

Nightly 68 now has an ARM64 JIT. ARM64 will improve stability (fewer out-of-memory crashes) and security (better ASLR), but is not expected to have much impact on performance at this time.

Nightly 68 has enabled Android PGO. Improves Speedometer score by 5%!

Nightly 68 has reduced paint suppression delay to improve First Contentful Paint time.

Nightly 68 has enabled Retained Display Lists to improve responsiveness on complex pages.

Performance

Policy Engine

Privacy / Security

Search

No user-facing updates this time, but lots of ongoing work on multiple fronts: WebExtension default engines New search codes Better test coverage User Research and experiments



Quantum Bar