Let’s get straight into update #12!
Oh, hey, anyone notice any icon chances recently? Yeah, they’re pretty wonderful. Or maybe I should say funderful? Looking forward to where they end up!
Speaking of looking forward, I’m going to be on vacation for the next two weeks. But fear not! Jared and Mike will be covering Photon updates, so you’ll still be able to get your Photon phix.
Recent Changes
Menus/structure:
- When users first open Firefox 57, we will now move items they added to the old hamburger panel into the new overflow panel
- As part of this work, the photon structure pref was removed, and we made a start with removing some of the old code we were lugging around until now. This removed over 2500 lines of code!
- Pocket was added to the page action menu.
- You can now removed pinned page actions from the URL bar via a context menu on the icons (in addition to the menu items in the page action menu itself).
- The favicon for customize mode now matches the icon used elsewhere.
- We broke, and then fixed, the history button. Oops. Sorry about that!
- Fixed a bunch of styling and behavior issues.
Animation:
- New panel animations have landed.
- More of the new download animation has landed. When a download starts, and arrow zooms into the download icon, and when it finishes the download icon expands/pulses a couple times.
- Also made the download progressbar fill in the opposite direction in RTL locales.
- Made adjustments to the stop-reload animation to stop playing the animation if pages load fast, also not playing the animation while tabs are opening or closing.
Preferences:
- Completed a general facelift of preferences (font & size & colors) to match Photon style. New icons, too.
- Removed all colons from subdialog headers.
- Nearing completion of the Photon preferences MVP work!
Visual redesign:
- Updated the button positions in the navbar, and made them more customizable. (This was a contributor patch – thanks!)
- Close buttons updated across the UI (also a contributor patch!)
- The “Compact Light” and “Compact Dark” themes have been renamed to simply “Light” and “Dark”. (The UI density setting is already independent of the theme.)
Onboarding:
- Added the opt-out auto-refresh checkbox into the stub installer. When it finds you’re (re)installing Firefox on top of an already-installed Firefox that’s 2+ versions out of date, it will offer to perform a profile refresh. This helps avoid problems with people who once tried Firefox, but then stopped using it (sometimes due to problems caused by an add-on or setting).
- Updated the UITour highlight style to the Photon style.
- Added UITour support for the Page Action panel, so the Onboarding can later use it to introduce the Screenshot feature located there.
- Addressed a couple of accessibility issues.
Performance:
- The tab strip now uses CSS smooth-scroll, which avoids janky synchronous reflows while scrolling through tabs.
- When closing a tab, the next tab is now selected faster.
- Replaced various timers with idle callbacks to avoid jank soon after startup.
Dolske's blog 
Stick with the purple to green fox above. It’s good.
Photon is a great project and I like it.
Just two simple suggestions:
– Make open the Library in a tab and not in separate window;
– RSS icon in Locationbar.
Thanks.
Unfortunately the Photon feature-set is pretty well locked-in at this point, so other work will have to wait until after 57.
Hi! There’s a plan to work on the download pop up? Maybe migrate that part into a tab or something like that?
I’m not aware of any upcoming work in this area.
How do I get these new features?
Great question! This work is currently landing in the development branch of Firefox, and you can download builds from https://nightly.mozilla.org/. Or you can sit tight, and wait for the final version when it’s released to the general Firefox population in November.
Will detachment and reattachment of tab to windows animation be improved?
Chrome has a very slick style to do this. Is something similar planned for Photon?
Not in 57, but it’s on the list for work to consider afterwards.
This look great so far! Question: will it ever be possible to use native context menus on macOS? The context menus in FF now seem to be pretty deeply-ingrained, but I was wondering if this was something that could have been changed in the major 57 overhaul.
Why do you want “native” menus — is there something missing or not looking right? I don’t see anything obvious (other than the icons we added at the top).
They look fine, but the behavior is not correct. On native applications on Mac, when you hold down the right mouse button for a few seconds then release, the context menu should disappear. On Firefox, the context menus don’t disappear. The other thing is if you go into “Mission Control”, the native behavior is to close the context menu. That doesn’t happen in Firefox either.