Just like jaws did last week, I’m taking over for dolske this week to talk about stuff going on with Photon Engineering. So sit back, strap in, and absorb Photon Engineering Newsletter #14!
If you’ve got the release calendar at hand, you’ll note that Nightly 57 merges to Beta on September 20th. Given that there’s usually a soft-freeze before the merge, this means that there are less than 4 weeks remaining for Photon development. That’s right – in less than a month’s time, folks on the Beta channel who might not be following Nightly development are going to get their first Photon experience. That’ll be pretty exciting!
So with the clock winding down, the Photon team has started to shift more towards polish and bug-fixing. At this point, all of the major changes should have landed, and now we need to buff the code to a sparkling sheen.
The first thing you may have noticed is that, after a solid run of dogefox, the icon has shifted again:
We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming
The second big change are our new 60fps1 loading throbbers in the tabs, coming straight to you from the Photon Animations team!
I think it’s fair to say that Photon Animations are giving Firefox a turbo boost!
Other recent changes
Menus and structure
- A “Bookmarking Tools” subview has been added to the Library button so you can easily get to the bookmarks toolbar, sidebar, and bookmarks menu button
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How convenient!
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- You might have noticed that the downloads button will only appear when downloads exist and isn’t movable anymore. This is something we’re still tinkering with, so stay tuned.
- We made the sync animation prettier! Check it out!
Animations
- Did we mention the new tab loading throbber?
Preferences
- All MVP work is completed! The team is now fixing polish bugs. Outstanding!
Visual redesign
- The styles for the sidebar have been updated on WIndows!
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The bookmarks sidebar finally gets some attention!
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- New icons have landed for a number of Firefox functions. Can you find them all?
- The team also landed a slew of polish and bug fixes. Here’s the full list!
Onboarding
- The Firefox 57 tours have been enabled!
- The PageAction UITour highlight style has been updated to be more consistent with the rest of Photon
Nifty!
- A bunch of polish and bugfixes for the onboarding tour have landed!
Performance
- The performance team quickly diagnosed a regression in the FX_NEW_WINDOW_MS Telemetry probe and the regressing patch has been backed out.
The screen capturing software I used here is only capturing at 30fps, so it’s really not doing it justice. This tweet might capture it better. ↩