Photon Engineering Newsletter #13

[Jared Wein]

(via
https://msujaws.wordpress.com/2017/08/18/photon-engineering-newsletter-13/ )

This week I’m taking over for Dolske
<https://dolske.wordpress.com/2017/08/13/photon-engineering-newsletter-12/>
as he takes a vacation to view the eclipse. This is issue #13
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bt88_YwoPbY> of the Photon Engineering
Newsletter.

This past week the Nightly team has had some fun with the Firefox icon.
We’ve seen the following icons grace Nightly builds in the past week:

The icon in the top-left was created in 2011 by Sean Martell
<https://twitter.com/mart3ll/status/144281191095341056>. The icon in the
top-right was the original Phoenix icon. Phoenix was later renamed
Firebird, and then the name was later changed to Firefox
<https://blog.mozilla.org/community/2013/05/13/milestone-phoenix-0-1-released-first-version-of-firefox/>.
The icon in the bottom right was the first “Firefox” icon, designed by
Steven Garrity
<http://www.etiziano.com/I_love_logo_design/history_of_the_firefox_logo.html>
in 2003. The icon in the bottom-right, well it is such logo with much
browser <http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/doge>, we couldn’t help ourselves to
not share it.
Recent Changes Menus/structure:

The Report Site Issue button has been moved to the Page Action menu
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1373650> in Nightly and Dev
Edition. This button doesn’t ship to users on Beta or Release.

https://msujaws.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/2017-08-18_1554.png is a
screenshot of the Page Action menu.

Probably the biggest visual change this week is that we now have spacers in
the toolbar <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1383009>. These
help to separate the location bar from the other utility buttons, and also
keep the location bar relatively centered within the window. We have also
replaced the bookmarks menu button with the Library button (it’s the icon
that looks like books on a shelf).

https://msujaws.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/2017-08-18_1557.png is a
screenshot of the Nightly window with the spacers in place.

We also widened various panels
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1381556> to help fit more
text in them.
Animation:

The Pin to Overflow animation has also been tweaked
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1380139> to not move as far.
This will likely be the final adjustment to this animation (seen on the
left). The Pocket button has moved to the location bar and the button
expands when a page is saved
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1387077> to Pocket (seen on
the right).

Pin to Overflow animation:
https://msujaws.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/overflow.gif

Pocket animation: https://msujaws.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/pocket.gif
Preferences:

Preferences has continued to work towards their own visual redesign for
Firefox 57. New icons were landed for the various categories
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1361957> within Preferences,
and some borders <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1386160> and
margins <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1377174> have been
adjusted.
Visual redesign:

The tab label is no longer centered on Mac
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1389008>. This now brings
Linux, Mac, and Windows to all have the same visual treatment for tabs.

Changing to Compact density within Customize mode changes the toolbar
buttons to now use less horizontal space. The following GIF shows the theme
changing from Compact to Normal to Touch densities.

Changing densities animation:
https://msujaws.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/density.gif
Onboarding:

New graphics for the onboarding tour
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1382520> have landed.


Performance:

Two of the main engineers focusing on Performance were on PTO this past
week so we don’t have an update from them.

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