Just like jaws did last week, I’m taking over for dolske this week to talk about stuff going on with Photon Engineering. So sit back, strap in, and absorb Photon Engineering Newsletter #14!

If you’ve got the release calendar at hand, you’ll note that Nightly 57 merges to Beta on September 20th. Given that there’s usually a soft-freeze before the merge, this means that there are less than 4 weeks remaining for Photon development. That’s right – in less than a month’s time, folks on the Beta channel who might not be following Nightly development are going to get their first Photon experience. That’ll be pretty exciting!

So with the clock winding down, the Photon team has started to shift more towards polish and bug-fixing. At this point, all of the major changes should have landed, and now we need to buff the code to a sparkling sheen.

The first thing you may have noticed is that, after a solid run of dogefox, the icon has shifted again:

The second big change are our new 60fps1 loading throbbers in the tabs, coming straight to you from the Photon Animations team!

Other recent changes

Menus and structure

A “Bookmarking Tools” subview has been added to the Library button so you can easily get to the bookmarks toolbar, sidebar, and bookmarks menu button

You might have noticed that the downloads button will only appear when downloads exist and isn’t movable anymore. This is something we’re still tinkering with, so stay tuned.

We made the sync animation prettier! Check it out!

Animations

Did we mention the new tab loading throbber?

Preferences

All MVP work is completed! The team is now fixing polish bugs. Outstanding!

Visual redesign

Onboarding

Performance

The performance team quickly diagnosed a regression in the FX_NEW_WINDOW_MS Telemetry probe and the regressing patch has been backed out.