Firefox 64 for developers

This article provides information about the changes in Firefox 64 that will affect developers. Firefox 64 was released on December 11, 2018.

• The Accessibility info-bar has been enhanced to include information about the color contrast ratio of text or images on the page (bug 1473037).
• Responsive Design Mode device selection is now saved between sessions (bug 1248619).
• Resources that are potentially affected by Tracking Protection are now indicated in the Network Monitor (bug 1333994).
• The Web Console got improvements around entering and evaluating code:
  • Autocomplete for Console expressions is now case-insensitive (bug 672733).
  • You can now step through the Console expression history with bash-like reverse search (bug 1024913).
  • Evaluated code in the Console is now syntax-highlighted in both the input and output (bug 1463669).
• Stepping in the JavaScript Debugger also had some improvements:
  • Stepping out of a function in the Debugger now skips the return value (bug 923975).

Removals

• The Developer Tools GCLI has been removed (bug 1429421).

No changes.

• CSS Scrollbars spec functionality has been enabled by default (bug 1492012).
• Interaction Media Features implemented, including pointer:coarse (bug 1035774). For any-pointer and any-hover implementation, see bug 1483111.
• The prefers-reduced-motion media feature is now supported in Firefox for Android (bug 1478505).
• CSS <gradient> values now support multi-position color stop syntax, e.g. yellow 25%, yellow 50% can now be written yellow 25% 50% (bug 1352643).
• The text-transform property now accepts the full-size-kana value (bug 1498148).
• Support added for -webkit-appearance to alleviate associated web compat issues (bug 1368555).
• Closely associated with the above update, we've also removed most of the Firefox-specific -moz-appearance values (bug 1496720).
• display: list-item is now supported on <legend> elements (bug 1486602).
• SVG path()s, as usable in offset-path, are now animatable (bug 1486094).
• If a selector chain or group includes a -webkit-prefixed pseudo-element, that pseudo-element no longer invalidates it (see bug 1424106 for the details, and bug 1486325 for enabling this feature).

Removals

• The non-standard -moz-box and -moz-inline-box display values have been hidden from web content (bug 1496961).
• The non-standard ::-moz-tree pseudo-elements have been hidden from web content (bug 1496961).
• The layout.css.filters.enabled preference has been removed; CSS filters can no longer be disabled (bug 1408841).
• A previous change — to swap the values of the 2-value overflow syntax so block is specified first and inline second (bug 1481866) — has been reverted (bug 1492567). See Bug 1481866 comment 14 for why.

No changes.

• The TC39 Well-formed JSON.stringify proposal has been implemented, to prevent JSON.stringify from returning ill-formed Unicode strings (bug 1469021).
• Proxied functions can now be passed to Function.prototype.toString.call() (bug 1440468).
• In the WebAssembly.Global constructor, if no value is specified a typed 0 value is used. This is specified by the DefaultValue algorithm (bug 1490286).

DOM

• A number of changes related to the Fullscreen API have been implemented:
  • The API has been unprefixed (bug 1269276).
  • The Element.requestFullscreen() and Document.exitFullscreen() methods both now return a Promise, which is resolved when the mode change is complete (bug 1188256 and bug 1491212).
  • Previously, fullscreenchange and fullscreenerror events were dispatched to the Document first, then the Element. This has been reversed so that the element gets the event first. This matches the latest specification as well as the behavior of Google Chrome (bug 1375319).
• The WebVR API (1.1) is now re-enabled in macOS (bug 1476091).
• Window.screenLeft and Window.screenTop have been implemented, as aliases of Window.screenX and Window.screenY (bug 1498860).
• The XMLHttpRequest.getAllResponseHeaders() method now returns header names all in lowercase, as per spec (bug 1398718).
• The legacy HTMLAllCollection interface has been updated as per recent spec updates (bug 1398354).
• Navigator.buildID now returns a fixed timestamp as a privacy measure (bug 583181).
• The following Document.execCommand() UI feature commands have been disabled by default (bug 1490641:
  • enableObjectResizing
  • enableInlineTableEditing
  • enableAbsolutePositionEditor

Service workers

• The ServiceWorkerContainer.startMessages() method has been implemented (bug 1263734).

Media, Web Audio, and WebRTC

• The PannerNode.refDistance, PannerNode.maxDistance, PannerNode.rolloffFactor, and PannerNode.coneOuterGain properties now correctly throw exceptions when set to values outside their accepted ranges (bug 1487963).
• RTCRtpEncodingParameters settings changed via RTCRtpSender.setParameters() used to not update if the changes were made during a call. They will now update live, without renegotiation (bug 1253499).
• RTCIceCandidateStats.relayProtocol has been implemented — this is the standardized version of RTCIceCandidateStats.mozLocalTransport, which has now been deprecated (bug 1435789).
• Automatic Gain Control (AGC) is now enabled by default; this can be changed using the preference media.getusermedia.agc_enabled (bug 1496714).

Removals

• The Window.event property, added in Firefox 63 to aid with web compat issues, has been put behind a pref (dom.window.event.enabled) and disabled by default in release versions for now due to other issues that have been uncovered (bug 1493869). Note that this was actually done late in the Firefox 63 release cycle, but we are mentioning it here just in case.
• The LocalMediaStream interface and its stop() method have been removed (bug 1258143). This method is no longer available with the deprecation of LocalMediaStream. See Stopping a video stream in MediaStreamTrack.stop() to learn how to stop an entire stream.
• The AudioStreamTrack and VideoStreamTrack interfaces have been removed, as both have been deprecated for some time (bug 1377146). Their functionality has been merged into MediaStreamTrack; tracks are now identified by the value of their kind property, such as audio or video.

• The Symantec CA Distrust plan has been implemented (see bug 1409257; see also the Mozilla's Plan for Symantec Roots discussion for more details).
• Referrer-Policy can now be used to govern resources fetched via stylesheets (bug 1330487) — see Integration with CSS in Referrer-Policy for more information.

No changes.

API changes

• Deprecated command end-points without the Marionette:, L10n:, or Addon: prefix (including singeTap) have been removed (bug 1504478, bug 1504940).

Bug fixes

• Synthesized Shift key events by using WebDriver:PerformActions didn't result in capitalized letters (bug 1405370).
• WebDriver:Navigate could cause an infinite hang if the tab's underlying content process is changed multiple times during that navigation (bug 1504807).
• To improve the performance, and to reduce the memory footprint of Firefox the default page to be loaded for a new tab or window is no longer about:newtab but about:blank (bug 1506643).
• The content blocking introduction panel, which was shown on various web pages and caused element interactions to fail is disabled by default now (bug 1488826).

Menus

• A new API, menus.overrideContext(), can be called from the contextmenu DOM event to set a custom context menu in extension pages. This API allows extensions to hide all default Firefox menu items in favor of providing a custom context menu UI. This context menu can consist of multiple top-level menu items from the extension, and may optionally include tab or bookmark context menu items from other extensions. See this blog post for more details.
  • menus.overrideContext() was implemented in (bug 1280347).
  • The showDefaults: false option, which can be used to hide the default context menu options, was implemented in (bug 1367160).
  • documentURLPatterns can now be used to match a moz-extension:// document URL, even if menus.overrideContext() is used. This way, it can reliably be used to restrict custom menu items to certain documents (bug 1498896).
• You can now restrict where context menus can appear in an add-on using the new viewTypes property in menus.create() and menus.update() (bug 1416839).
• menus.update() can now be used to update the icon of an existing menu item (bug 1414566).
• Extensions can now detect which mouse button was used when a menu item was clicked — this can be found using the new button property of menus.OnClickData (bug 1469148).

Windows

• The windows.create() method now has a new option available — cookieStoreId — which specifies the CookieStoreId to use for all tabs that were created when the window is opened (bug 1393570).

Privacy

• The privacy.websites cookieConfig property is an object that can accept a behavior property — this property can now take a new value, reject_trackers, which instructs the extension to reject tracking cookies (bug 1493057).

devtools.panels API

• The devtools.panels.elements Sidebar.setPage() method is now supported (bug 1398734).

• The new pinned property of the page_action manifest key enables extensions to control whether their page actions should be pinned to the location bar on install or not (bug 1494135).
• In native manifests on Windows, the 32-bit registry view (Wow6432Node) will be checked first for registry keys, followed by the "native" registry view; you should use whichever is appropriate for your application (bug 1494709).
• The chrome_settings_overrides field's search_provider object can now include new properties — suggest_url and suggest_url_post_params (bug 1486819), and search_url_post_params.

• Hacks release post: Firefox 64 Released