Photon Engineering Newsletter #14

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:

The new Nightly icon

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!

The new loading throbber in Nightly

I think it’s fair to say that Photon Animations are giving Firefox a turbo boost!

Other recent changes

Menus and structure

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

Onboarding

Performance


  1. 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.