MetaMask Monthly: November 2020
With a mere dozen-or-so days left until the end of the year, people and projects around the world are winding down. Unless you’re immersed in Web 3.0, where the action only seems to be speeding up! Flash loan transaction volume hit record levels in November, DeFi projects and protocols are merging, the ecosystem is getting serious about gas and Eth-2 launched to kick-off the festive season.
In case you missed it, here’s what happened in the MetaVerse this month:
Breaking changes to the MetaMask provider are here
If you are a MetaMask user, don’t worry, your experience won’t be affected. If you are a developer, read on to determine if your dapp will be impacted.
Early in the new year MetaMask will stop injecting window.web3 and make the following breaking changes to our window.ethereum API:
- Stop 0-padding eth_chainId return values
- Stop emitting the chainIdChanged event, and instead only emit chainChanged
- Remove ethereum.publicConfigStore
- Remove the ethereum._metamask.isEnabled experimental method
- Remove the ethereum._metamask.isApproved experimental method
If you do not use any of the features that are being removed as part of this update, you’re good to go! If you do use any of the above features, head to our migration guide for next steps.
We’ve provided greater detail about what’s changing and why in this blog post. You can follow this GitHub issue for updates. If you have questions or need any help, jump into the MetaMask Discord to connect with the team and we’ll do our very best to help you out.
Security updates: SES lockdown now in production
Resulting from our Lava Moat project, every MetaMask extension release, from Version 8.0.6 upward, deploys Secure EcmaScript from Agoric. This hardens our entire codebase and greatly reduces the number of ways that a malicious dependency can compromise a user’s wallet. In short, your wallet is more secure than ever! You won’t see this change visibly, but it’s an important update that will continue to keep MetaMask users safe in the long run.
We’ve improved transaction management, so you can transact more cheaply, swiftly and reliably
We’re constantly optimizing our service to provide MetaMask users with a continuously better wallet experience. Over the last two months, we’ve shipped a number of tweaks and fixes to improve the way gas is estimated inside the product. Now, you can expect greater consistency in gas prices shown on the confirmation screen, as well as a general increase in the speed of transactions.
To accomplish this, we’ve launched an advanced gas estimation API rolling out first inside our Swaps feature, and then for all MetaMask transactions. This API aggregates multiple gas estimation services to provide the optimal gas estimations. This implementation brings more reliability and consistency to gas prices in MetaMask — and cheaper, faster transactions to Swaps users.
PSA: Beware phishing activity in Google search results
Unfortunately, it’s all too easy for bad actors to buy Google Search Ads and impersonate sites. As crypto users, we must constantly be vigilant. Always use direct links to a crypto site, bookmark your faves for easy access — and if you need to use search, be sure to double check those urls!
What’s new in MetaMask Mobile
The browser is more secure than ever
Due to limitations with the webview implementation, web3 injection to iframes will be temporarily disabled, so dapps that run inside iframes, or rely on this functionality, may not work. This makes using web3 sites in the MetaMask mobile browser more secure.
User experience improvements
We’re continuously using community feedback to improve our app. Here are some user suggestions that made it into production this month:
- To help users keep their wallet secure, MetaMask strives to make security tools easily accessible and intuitive to use. With recent updates, users can now revisit these tools anytime they wish:
- Users who’d like to import their desktop wallet using the 24-word seed phrase are now able to do so in the mobile app
- We’ve made the experience of signing transactions via deeplinks more reliable. If you are a developer, learn how to use deep links for signing with MetaMask mobile here
- One of the most common user errors inside a wallet is sending funds to a token address (rather than a wallet address), and hence losing them. To help prevent users making this mistake, MetaMask Mobile will now generate a warning whenever it detects that a token address has been input, to give the user a chance to review before the transfer is made:
Want to Be the First to Know When Swaps Goes Mobile?
To give back to our users and dapp integrators, we like to give the MetaMask community and developers a heads-up on what’s coming before anybody else. To get product communications and platform updates before the rest of the industry, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter.
If you’re a developer and specifically want to be kept in the loop on MetaMask dev tools as they evolve (and help shape them through user research), you can sign up to our Dev Updates list here.
Desktop Extension Now Available for Microsoft Edge Users
We’re excited to bring the MetaMask experience to Microsoft Windows users! If Edge is your preferred browser, head to the Microsoft Store and download the Edge extension to start using MetaMask.
Keep on exploring! Remember, if you ever need a little help, head to our Community Support Channel or jump into the MetaMask Discord to connect with the team.
Team MetaMask 🦊
