As part of the tests run in the CircleCI `aio_monitoring` job, we need
to retrieve `sitemap.xml` from the site under test. Previously, the URL
used to retrieve that contained a double-slash (`//`). At some point,
Firebase (which is used for hosting the site) stopped normalizing
double-slashes to a single slash, causing the test to fail.
This commit fixes the problem by ensuring that the constructed URLs do
not contain double-slashes.
PR Close#25641
Previously, we were running the e2e tests from master against
`https://angular.io` (deployed from the stable branch). Often the e2e
tests from master do not apply to the stable branch, since the app has
deviated slightly.
This commit fixes this by stop running the full e2e tests against the
deployed versions, but a smaller set of "smoke tests", which check basic
functionality that is less likely to change between versions.
PR Close#23390
