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:

Animation:

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:

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: