Platform/Layout/Printing and fragmentation

This page provides information about our efforts in 2020 to improve the platform parts of printing and fragmentation in Firefox. Given how closely linked the frondend and platform parts of printing are, this will inevitably involve some frontend work too.

Rationale

Support for printing in Firefox has historically been poorly maintained, and is currently in a dismal state compared to other browsers. There are two main areas for improvement:

• Printing UX: Firefox’s printing UI/UX lacks consistency and is complicated and confusing compared to the competition. Print settings are displayed differently across operating systems, different methods of accessing printing lead to different dialogs, and print preview is not displayed by default on macOS.
• Printing output: There is a significantly-sized backlog of user-reported bugs related to print output (for both printing devices and PDF export). Some of these bugs include cases where printing fails completely, several pages are missing, or the printed layout is just incorrect.

OSX is a popular platform among web developers and designers. It is important we provide a means for testing web content accessibility in OSX. Historically, our OSX support has been plagued with performance issues, but we can still provide a good benchmark for developers to test with. After we reach API completeness, we will do a second pass to optimize the experience for VoiceOver users and assure the performance is optimal and comparable to other browsers.

Milestone One (2020 H1)

Fragmentation

Full Query

ID	Summary	Priority	Status
267029	Absolutely positioned elements all print on first page, and the ones that don't fit aren't shown	P2	RESOLVED
454059	Creating PDF of web page: hyperlinks are lost.	P2	RESOLVED
471015	Fieldsets are truncated to one page when printed / print-previewed	P3	RESOLVED
534182	Tall inline-block/inline-table/inline-grid/inline-flex are cropped in print / print-preview [fixed by bug 1681052]	P3	RESOLVED
1017137	Firefox can't print long lists properly from http://chem.sis.nlm.nih.gov/chemidplus/	P3	RESOLVED
1112012	Firefox does not print web-pages without <title> and with huge URLs, in Ubuntu. (i.e. no pages come out of the printer)	--	RESOLVED
1250348	Tall <iframe> elements are truncated at page boundaries (instead of being split across pages, like tall images are)	P3	NEW
1318856	when printing a tall image (or SVG graphic), it is truncated rather than split across pages	--	NEW
1344992	Lost printing content if specify the position:absolute and transform style.	--	RESOLVED
1406163	Printing table-in-td, content invisible after first line on page 2, following page-break-after	P3	RESOLVED
1417615	[Layout] Content truncated when printing a page containing a CSS grid with large row	P3	RESOLVED
1427141	CSS page-break-before can cause elements to disappear in HTML tables	P3	RESOLVED
1468369	abs.pos. element immediately after a forced page break does not render	P3	NEW
1560544	Paypal mailing label does not print bar code	P3	RESOLVED
1564128	Unable to print CSS animations/transitions and web animations	P3	RESOLVED
1572573	Printing page with large table fails to display anything after the first page.	P2	RESOLVED
1574684	www.specsavers.co.uk doesn't fully print	P3	RESOLVED
1615910	[meta] Common printing issues that enterprise users complain about	P2	NEW
1626790	Apply CSS animation/transitions to pseudo elements when printing	P3	RESOLVED
1642842	FireFox PrintPreview clips bottom of a page	--	RESOLVED
1661201	Fails to fragment grid item.	--	RESOLVED
1696334	Printing emails from gmail generates blank pages instead of content	P3	VERIFIED

22 Total; 4 Open (18.18%); 17 Resolved (77.27%); 1 Verified (4.55%);

Milestone Two (2020 H2)

TBD