Extensions in Firefox 82

Jorge Villalobos

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Before we get to the Firefox 82 updates, I want to let you know that Philipp has passed the baton for these blog posts over to me. I plan to stick to the same format you know and hopefully love, but leave a comment if there’s anything you’d like to see change in future installments.

Language Packs

Starting with Firefox 82, language packs will be updated in tandem with Firefox updates. Users with an active language pack will no longer have to deal with the hassle of defaulting back to English while the language pack update is pending delivery.

Misc updates in Firefox 82

The cookie permission is no longer required in order to obtain the cookieStoreId for a tab, making it possible to identify container tabs without additional permissions.

The error message logged when a webRequest event listener is passed invalid match patterns in the urls value is now much easier to understand.

Firefox site isolation by default starting in Nightly 83

As mentioned earlier, we’re working on a big change to Firefox that isolates sites from one another. In the next few weeks, we’ll be rolling out an experiment to enable isolation by default for most Nightly users, starting in Firefox 83, with plans for a similar experiment on Beta by the end of the year.

For extensions that deal with screenshots, we’ve extended the captureTab and captureVisibleTab methods to enable capturing an arbitrary area of the page, outside the currently visible viewport. This should cover functionality previously enabled by the (long deprecated) drawWindow method, and you can find more details about new rect and scale options on the ImageDetails MDN page.

While we haven’t seen many reports of extension incompatibilities till now, Fission is a big architectural change to Firefox, and the web platform has many corner cases. You can help us find anything we missed by testing your extensions with Fission enabled, and reporting any issues on Bugzilla.

Thanks

Thank you to Michael Goossens for his multiple contributions to this release.

1 response

  1. Hans wrote on :

    Thank you for the update.

    I just wanted to note that putting “Firefox site isolation by default starting in Nightly 83” in the middle of the update is a bit confusing.
    It gives the impression that you’re talking about version 83 for the rest of the text.

    But according to the ImageDetails MDN page, this feature is available in FF 82:
    For extensions that deal with screenshots, we’ve extended the captureTab and captureVisibleTab methods to enable capturing an arbitrary area of the page, outside the currently visible viewport.