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.
Dolske's blog 
Just wanted to say that the “burst across the tab” animation is surprisingly pleasant. I don’t know why, and I wouldn’t have thought of it, but it’s a really re-assuring notification that a tab is ready without disturbing me when I don’t care. Well done!
Correct me if I’m wrong, but the UI uses Javascript right? Has it been discussed to use WebAssembly in the UI instead of Javascript?
WebAssembly is mainly useful as a compilation target for C/C++ code, so it can run inside the browser. It’s not a way to speed up JavaScript itself.
Hey Justin — great update. There is a bug in the latest Nightly related to the “page title” and disabling the “Title Bar”. When the Title Bar is disabled, the tab bar chrome turns black, and the title of the current page is rendered over the tabs. It’s all garbled and ugly. I looked through the Mozillazine forums and Bugzilla for a related bug, but my search didn’t turn up anything conclusive.
Is this something you already have on your radar? If yes, hallelujah. If not, let me know and I will help in any way necessary.
Manoj
I don’t see this issue. If you can reproduce in a new profile, please file a bug.
I get this message when launching Nightly from the Command Line:
2017-09-13 16:20:21.125 firefox[20503:2648695] *** WARNING: Textured window is getting an implicitly transparent titlebar. This will break when linking against newer SDKs. Use NSWindow’s -titlebarAppearsTransparent=YES instead.
Could this be because I am on macOS High Sierra?
Thanks,
Manoj
Clicked enter too soon. This was in a “New Profile”.
Here’s the bug, filed by @mstange: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1391790
Cool. Follow along there for updates.
Screenshot: http://imgur.com/a/zy7gM
Any progress on bug 1389518? It’s really the only big Photon bug I’ve came across in about a week so far of using Nightly.
Latest updates in the bug say this is making progress.
Photon project is just amazing. I like so much the UI, animations and UX !
But i need to know what are projects for mobile ? I think the UI can be better, it’s just a proposition but i think it can do a better experience for mobile users : https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/improvements-of-ui-interface-for-firefox-mobile-android/18039
Also, animations can be cool maybe ? I would like to see more news in mobile. But otherwise thank you for your works on desktop, it’s so pleasant!
The focus of Quantum/Photon for 57 is desktop Firefox. Although mobile will benefit from some of this work, and they’re also doing some UI updates as well.
The URL bar dropmarker now changes location, depending on whether you’re using a new tab (at the very end of the URL bar) or an existing tab (it gets bumped inwards due to other page icons being present). Even on existing pages, it shifts location, because some pages have different buttons that become available (I think it’s mainly the ‘reader view’ button that may or may not be present).
I’m not sure this is a good idea, as I’m finding myself getting (momentarily, of course) confused as to where it should be located from tab to tab. Aside from the back button, it’s probably the ‘button’ I use the most.
Thanks for the news letter updates.