Photon Engineering Newsletter #10

Woo yeah! Time for Photon newsletter #10!

Nightly-57 this week

Way back in newsletter #2, I talked about the Photon program schedule. Briefly, to save you a click: Photon is shipping with Firefox 57, and to allow time for bugfixes, quality, and polish we’ve been targeting August 7th as the date when we’ll be done with “major work.” That gives us 6 weeks of Nightly-57 to do that bugfixing (and another 6 weeks of Beta-57 for any further critical or low-risk improvements).

I’m pleased to report that we’re still solidly on track. Most of the big-ticket features for Photon have already landed, and the last few (notably: rectangular tabs, pinning Page Action items to the URL bar) are in good shape to land soon. That’s not to say Photon is “done” – just that the biggest and riskiest work will largely be behind us, and upcoming work will start to be more about finishing off rough edges.

Recent Changes

Menus/structure:

• Added a history view to the Library button
• New overflow panel styling landed. This makes the overflow panel look much better in both customize mode and when opened from the toolbar.
• Patches landed in github to have a Screenshots entry in the Library. (This won’t be user-visible until the next Screenshots-to-mozilla-central uplift.)
• Added a customize footer to the overflow panel.

Animation:

• The Stop/Reload animation has been tweaked to run faster.
• Animations have been fixed to be positioned correctly regardless of display font size. [1] [2]
• The Save to Bookmarks animation has landed in Nightly. (Add the Library button to the toolbar for the full effect!)
  
  
• The Save to Pocket animation has also landed  (Again, you’ll want to ensure the Library button is in the toolbar to see all of the animation.)
  

Preferences:

• Fixed Performance section regression around number of processes and uplifted it to Beta-55.
• Started working on visual refresh but are holding off landing until after the uplift. This allows QA to finish verifying the changes (in Nightly) that will ship with Firefox 56, without these 57-only changes getting in the way.

Visual redesign:

• Fix for disappearing minimize button on Win 10.
• Made the tab title text’s color better match the system text color.
• Increase the size of main menu items when accessed through touch.
• The titlebar on macOS is now colored in customize mode too.
• Tweaked toolbar button and the location / search bar styling on Linux.
• New tab strip icons for the New Tab and List All Tabs buttons.

Onboarding:

• The first uncompleted tour is now shown by default (instead of just the first tour).
• Updated the stub installer tagline to “Built for people, not for profit.
• Made the “Learn More” button not wrap.
• The Sync tour will be automatically marked as completed when you sign in with a Firefox account.
• When refreshing a profile, don’t migrate a user’s session (tabs) unless the refresh was invoked by the user. This allows the reset triggered by the stub installer (e.g. for users coming back to Firefox after a long absence) to have a fresh experience, instead of seeing old tabs from months ago.
• Made the onboarding UI look better in high-contrast mode.

Performance:

• Landed an epic set of patches to gain a ~4% win on ts_paint! This work makes us lazily load a bunch of JS that was previously being loaded from <script> tags in browser.xul (and similar).
• The stop button is no longer shown when doing local about: pageload for some nice Talos wins. There’s no expected network delay, so the flickering of the stop/reload button is useless overhead.
• Updated our reflow tests to be more reliable

 

That’s it for now!