Photon Engineering Newsletter #13
18 August, 2017 § 12 Comments
This week I’m taking over for Dolske as he takes a vacation to view the eclipse. This is issue #13 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. 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. The icon in the bottom left was the first “Firefox” icon, designed by Steven Garrity in 2003. The icon in the bottom-right, well it is such logo with much browser, 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 in Nightly and Dev Edition. This button doesn’t ship to users on Beta or Release.
Probably the biggest visual change this week is that we now have spacers in the toolbar. 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).
We also widened various panels to help fit more text in them.
Animation:
The Pin to Overflow animation has also been tweaked 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 to Pocket (seen on the right).
Preferences:
Preferences has continued to work towards their own visual redesign for Firefox 57. New icons were landed for the various categories within Preferences, and some borders and margins have been adjusted.
Visual redesign:
The tab label is no longer centered on Mac. 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.
Onboarding:
New graphics for the onboarding tour 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.
JAWS 
Hi!
I really like the new page action integration of the “report site issue” button and I wonder if it makes sense to also ship this button in the stable release of Firefox 57. In my opinion the button is a great idea, the new position is not annoying and if Firefox 57 will ship with Stylo maybe there will be still a few unknown differences, who knows. What do you think?
This is not my territory, but I think we get different types of feedback from the various release channels. Nightly and Dev Edition tend to give us more detailed qualitative feedback and the respondents are more likely to reply to follow-up questions. Beta and Release are better for quantitative data and tend to be harder to follow up with respondents. In addition, I’m not sure if the web compatibility team would be able to handle the amount of feedback if this was shipped to a couple orders of magnitude more users.
@msujaws: makes sense, thank you. 😉
“The icon in the bottom right was the first “Firefox” icon, designed by Steven Garrity in 2003.”
I believe you mean bottom left.
Yes, thank you. This is fixed now.
I loved the logo changes this week! Do you have a link for a good resolution version of the new one for Firefox (not pictured here)? I mean, a version which isn’t recoloured for Nightly or mashed-up with Doge. I’ll be very curious to see it in detail but can’t seem to be able to find it (which it may be on purpose, in that case, I’ll be patient), except in small size this mock-up: https://mozilla.invisionapp.com/share/KFD16G9AU#/screens/248596305_New_Tab_-_Firefox_Logo
I think you’ll just have to wait 🙂
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Why aren’t you using a fixed character? Why using unicorns and dinosaurs in the on-boarding tour? The name of Firefox is attached to a fox and I believe having a fixed character helps with marketing.
A “fox” doesn’t have to live a life of solitude. It’s okay to have some friends around 🙂
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