Photon Engineering Newsletter #15

I’m back from a vacation to see the eclipse, so it’s time for Newsletter #15! (It’s taking me some time to get caught up, so this update covers the last 2 or so weeks.)

As noted in my previous update, Mike and Jared took over Newsletter duties while I was out. If you somehow missed their excellent updates – Newsletter #13 and Newsletter #14 – please check them out. (Go ahead, I’ll wait.)

We’re getting very close to Firefox 57 entering Beta! Code merges to the Beta on September 20th, and the first Beta release should come on the 26th. The Photon project is targeting the 15th to be ready for Beta, just to make sure there’s a bit of time to spare. We’ll be continuing to fix bugs and improve polish during the Beta, but the type of fixes we make will begin to scale back, as we focus on making sure 57 is a rock-solid release. This means becoming increasingly risk-adverse – there will always be bugs (and more releases to fix them in), so we very much want to avoid causing new regressions shortly before 57 ships to everybody. Last-minute firedrills are no fun for anyone. But we’re in really great shape right now – we’re done with feature development, are already shifting to more minor fixes, and there isn’t anything really scary waiting to be fixed.

Recent Changes

Menus/structure:

• The order of the icons in the URL bar was updated.
• When navigating Photon-style panels with the keyboard, the previously selected item will remain hilighted when going back.
• Library and page action integration for screenshots finally made it to Nightly.
• The URL bar dropmarker will now disappear when typing.
• Fixed some more ordering issues in the page actions in the url bar.
• Fixed an issue with send to device where the popup would stay open after sending a tab.
• Made the page action buttons announce themselves correctly to screenreaders.
• The bookmarks menu and the sidebar header menu look more Photon-y.
• The “Restore Previous Session” item is now a toplevel item in the hamburger panel. It (and its toplevel menubar cousin) also gets hidden (instead of disabled) if you’ve set Firefox to automatically restore your session.

Animation:

• The “burst” across the tab when the page load is complete has landed.
  
• Added a “Copy URL” and “Send to Device” popup so that there’s clearer feedback when performing these actions.
  
• Various fixes to animations of the library button, tab loading indicator in RTL, pocket icon corruption.
• Fixed various follow-ups with the burst animation, tab loading indicator, and and copy link confirmation.
• Fixed the animation of panels  when they are anchored at the bottom.

Preferences:

• Once last P1 bug to feature complete!
• Team to move to help out Onboarding once all P1 and important P3s are fixed.

Visual redesign:

• (A couple of slow weeks due to multiple people being sick and/or on PTO)
• Minor update to sidebar styling on Linux.
• The URL bar icon has been changed from an ⓘ to an 🔍 when on about:newtab, to better indicate that it can be used as a search field too.
• Superstar contributor Tim Nguyen landed a patch to update notification icons to Photon style, as well as some other icons that hadn’t been updated.
• Fixed an issue that caused toolbar icons with a badge to mistakenly end up in overflow, in Compact theme mode.
• The Synced Tabs sidebar has been updated to Photon style.
• The URL bar “Go” button (arrow) is no longer green on hover.
• Find bar settings are easier to see now when using a dark theme.

Onboarding:

• Took on a number of new P1 bugs that came about as the result of user testing of the current design.
• Added a tour for Screenshots.
  
• The tour icon’s “speech bubble” will now be hidden for smaller window sizes.
• Updated the tour icon and notification to fit the new UI spec.
  

Performance:

• Landed a patch to pre-emptively warm up hovered tabs, but it caused some regressions.
• Limited the number of  sync reflows in the awesomebar to at most one per frame.
• A speculative connection from the parent process when initiating a page load from the URL bar is having a nice impact.
• We no longer do main thread IO during startup in nsHandler-json.js to initialize pdf.js, and Talos is happy about this!
• Landed a fix to avoid flickering when moving tabs across windows.

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