Photon Engineering Newsletter #2

[Justin Dolske]

(via
https://dolske.wordpress.com/2017/05/23/photon-engineering-newsletter-2/)

That’s right! Time for another Photon Engineering Newsletter! (As I
gradually catch up with real-time, this update covers through about May
16th).

May got off to a busy start for the Photon team. As I mentioned in last
week’s update, the team has largely shifted from the planning to
implementation, so visible changes are starting to come quickly.
Work Week

A particularly big event was the Photon team gathering in Mozilla’s Toronto
office for a work week. About 50 people from Engineering, UX, User
Research, and Program Management gathered, from all over the world, with a
focus on building Photon. Mozilla operates really well with
distributed/remote teams, but periodically getting together to do things
face-to-face is super useful to work through issues more quickly.

[image: photonww_shorlander_small]

It was really terrific to see so many people coming together to hack on
Photon. We got a lot done (more on that below), saw some great demos, and
the energy was high. And of course, no workweek is complete
<https://twitter.com/dolske/status/861592373150830592> without UX creating
some fun posters:

[image: 57small]

One important milestone reached during the week was setting the initial
scope for what’s going to be included in Photon (or, more bluntly, what’s
NOT going to be part of Photon when it ships in Firefox 57). We’re still
refining estimates, but it looks like all the major worked planned for
Photon can be accomplished. Most things placed in the “reserve backlog”
(meaning we’ll do it if there’s extra time left, but we’re not committing
to do them) are minor or nice-to-have things.

This is probably a good spot to talk a little more about our schedule
<https://wiki.mozilla.org/RapidRelease/Calendar>. Firefox 57 is the release
that Quantum and Photon are targeting. It’s scheduled to ship on November
14th, but there are important milestones before then… September 22nd is
when 57 enters Beta, after that point it’s increasingly hard to make
changes (because we don’t want to destabilize Firefox right before it
ships). August 7th is when Nightly becomes version 57. This is also our
target date to be complete with “major work” for Photon. This might seem a
little surprising, but it’s due to the recent process change
<https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/04/simplifying-firefox-release-channels/>
that removed Aurora. Under the old release schedule, August 7th is when
Nightly-57 uplifted to Aurora (beginning ~12 weeks of stabilization before
release). We want to keep the same amount of stabilization time (for a
project as big as Photon there is _always_ fallout and followup work), so
we kept the same calendar date for Photon’s target. This doesn’t mean we’ll
be “done” on August 7th, just that the focus will be shifting from
implementing features to fixing bugs, improving quality, and final polish.

And now for the part you’ve all been waiting for, the recent changes!
Recent Changes

Menus/structure:

- The page action menu (aka the “…” button at the end of the URL bar)
got the first menu items added to it
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1355323>, Copy URL and
Email Link. More coming, as this becomes the standard place for “actions
you can perform with this page” items.
[image: actionmenu_first]
- The new hamburger menu is coming along, although still disabled by
default (via the browser.photon.structure.enabled pref). Items for
character encoding, work offline, and the devtools submenu have been added
to it.
- The new overflow menu (also disabled by default, same pref) is nearing
completion with 2/3 of the bugs fixed. This menu is now shown in customize
mode (instead of the old hamburger menu); so instead of only showing icons
that couldn’t fit in the navbar (e.g. because you made your window too
narrow), it’s the new place you can customize with buttons you want to be
easily accessible without always taking up navbar space.

Animation:

- When rearranging tabs in the tabstrip, a snappier animation rate
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1355507> is now used.
- Work continues on animations for downloads toolbar button, stop/reload
button, and page loading indicator – but these haven’t landed yet.

Preferences:

- The “Updates” section of preferences now shows
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1356507> the current
Firefox version.
- Good progress at the workweek on fixing the first set of bugs
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1357285> needed to enable
searching within preferences.
- UX is working on some further changes to the reorganization that we
believe will improve it.

Visual redesign:

- The new styling for the location and search bars
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1352366> landed.
- The stop/reload button
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1364090> has been removed
from the end (inside) of the location bar, and is now a normal toolbar
button to the left of the location bar.
- The back/forward buttons
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1363840> have been
detached from the location bar.
- URL that are longer than the location box can display now fade out
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=653670> at the end.
- Minor update <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1361986> to
the about:privatebrowsing page (shown when opening a new private window).
- Upcoming work on compact/touch modes for the toolbar and more toolbar
button style changes.

Onboarding:

- Running Funnelcake tests for the new tour notification.
- Built a prototype of the new tab page tour overlay at the workweek.
- Will be adding new automigration UI to the Activity Stream new tab
page. Users trying Firefox for the first time will no longer immediately
see the old data migration wizard (which makes for a pretty poor first
impression). Instead, Firefox will automatically import from your previous
browser, so you launch straight into Firefox and can see your data. There’s
also a clear message indicating what happened, and giving you the choice to
keep (or not) the data, or try importing from a different browser. This
screencast shows the general flow:
[image: automig]

Performance:

- Florian landed a massive series of patches
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1353542> (assisted by an
automated code-rewriting tool) that switches use of Task.jsm/yield to ES7
async/await. The native ES7 code is more efficient, and we’ve often seen
the older Task.jsm usage show in the profiler. This also helps with
modernizing Firefox’s front end, which extensively uses JavaScript.
- The animation shown when opening a window is now suppressed
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1362103> for the first
window to be opened.
- Tab navigation <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1359352>
and restoring <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1364127> now
cause less visual noise in the tab title, by skipping the display of
unnecessary text (e.g. “Loading” and “New Tab”).
- A few <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1356826> things
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1364571> have
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1361900> been moved off
the startup path, so that Firefox launches faster.
- Removed some synchronous reflows when adding and removing tabs
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1364661> and when interacting
with the AwesomeBar
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1356763>.
- Working on adding tests to detect synchronous reflows, so that we can
ensure they don’t sneak back in after we remove them.



This concludes update #2.