These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 72

Developer Tools

• WebSocket Inspector (part of the Network monitor panel) is now supporting ActionCable WebSocket messages (bug)
  

  WebSocket Action Cable inspector

• Instant evaluation (aka Eager Eval) is now enabled in all channels and rides the train (bug)

  

  DevTools console displaying a preview evaluation of the object in the console

• Switching JS Execution context automatically updates instant evaluation results (bug) Note that you need to have the Context selector enabled (pref: devtools.webconsole.input.context)
  

  JS execution context selection menu

• Double-click table resize handler resizes column to fit its content (bug) (contributed by Farooq)
  

  Resizeable columns in DevTools Network tab

• The Application panel is now showing the current state of a Service Worker (bug).
  

  Service Workers “Status” field in DevTools Application tab

• Context menu for elements rendered in the Console panel has a new action called ”Reveal in Inspector”. It navigates the user to the Inspector panel and selects the clicked element (bug).
  

  Context menu in DevTools console displaying a “Reveal in Inspector (Q)” option

Fission

• Neil finished portingRemote Controller so the edit menu commands now work in fission

• Alphan Chen made some significant progress onsession restore by moving more work into the parent process.

• Remote Page Manager is going to be converted to use actors . The work there also simplifies the code which performs access checks so the work is done in a base class so mistakes can be minimized.

Lint

• Dave Townsend and Ed Lee have landedESLint andPrettier support for the nullish coalescing operator andoptional chaining.

  • This is accomplished by using babel as the parser for ESLint. If you see any strange problems, please let us know (file bugs and/or discuss in #lint on Matrix).

• We’ll probably need to wait until the next ESLint major version before we get globalThis support (tracking bug).

New Tab Page

• Finishing up moving pocket story recommendation provider work into promise worker. Patch is in review now.

Password Manager

• about:logins

  • Don’t re-authenticate the user to view saved passwords shortly after the previous prompt

• Login Capture Doorhanger

• (Re-)landed the dismissed doorhanger when a password field value is edited ! Users should always have the chance to save a password from a form now!

Performance

• bigiri has been doing a lot of research in how to cleanly decouple ASRouter from Activity Stream, to make it simpler to move more computation into the privileged about content process

• dthayer landed Fast Shutdown Phase 2 in Nightly , and we’re waiting for more Telemetry to saturate to give us a better sense of the impact out in the wild

• emalysz made it so that the Edit Bookmarks panel is now lazily loaded

• emalysz also made it so that GMP initialization occurs after first paint

• Gijs figured out anasty shutdown hang involving IndexedDB and RemoteSettings, and is working out some intermittents with it now

  • Fixing this will hopefully allow us to enable the blocklist during Talos tests , to make them more realistic

• Gijs is also working on making startupcache writes occur using the background thread pool

• Gijs tore out the old slow XML implementation of the blocklist! Yay!

• mconley has a patch up for review that reads a dynamically generated about:home document out of the HTTP cache at startup

  • mconley has a WIP patch for writing to that cache that will go up for review later this week

• mconley resolvedsome intermittents related to the privileged about content process

• mconley is continuing to analyze Avast’s impact on startup times

Picture-in-Picture

• The player window now has a solid black background

Search and Navigation

Search

• No problems have been reported with the new search engine configuration so far, we have landed a patch to load the configuration via remote settings. We are expecting to ship it in 77.

• Work has begun on reducing the amount of data in the search engine cache , and also some work investigating cache corruptions .

Address Bar

• Visual redesign (update 1)

  • QA verification ongoing

  • Fixed wrongly sized favicons

  • Fixed a problem with Search Tips being dismissed too early

  • Fixed a problem with Search Tips being shown with default browser prompt

  • Allow policies to turn off Interventions feature

• Make Address Bar modules more easily reusable by other projects

  • Various code cleanups, work continues

• Address Bar results composition improvements

  • Improved deduping of equivalent urls

User Journey

• Experiment witha new styleof heartbeat surveys

• Ongoing work to better integrate Messaging System and Normandy

• Ongoing work for a new about:welcome onboarding

• Adding telemetry to record failures to read attribution data