Categories: News

These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 19

Highlights

The new Photon hamburger menu

The new hamburger menu

  • We populated the onboarding overlay on about:newtab according to the UI spec. There are 5 tours with call-to-action buttons & you can hide the tour with a checkbox.
The new onboarding panel.

The new onboarding panel

Autocomplete 1st Result Time Graph

Mean!

Friends of the Firefox team

Project Updates

Add-ons

Activity Stream

  • June 15th Newsletter
  • Highlights:
    • Graduation Team has landed the about:newtab Preferences Pane, put in place a bunch of performance telemetry, and made some amazing progress on making sure all existing Firefox about:newtab tests pass.
    • The MVP Team has built out controls for collapsing/expanding AS sections, as well as landed the very cool ‘Recent Bookmarks’ section.
      • This iteration, we will be preffing on a minimal version of Activity Stream in Firefox Nightly!
    • Activity Stream Release Schedule

      The Activity Stream Release Schedule

    • Shield Study to examine AS vs. Tiles starting June 26th

Electrolysis (e10s)

  • Windows support for e10s+accessibility has been delayed until Firefox 56+ due to stability issues. Here’s the meta bug for the project. This bug appears to be the major blocker.

Firefox Core Engineering

Form Autofill

Form Autofill Demo

Note the neat form fill preview!

  • We enabled the heuristics algorithm. Form Autofill now supports forms without @autocomplete attributes, i.e. most en-US sites.
  • Enabled the auto-save feature and implemented the door hanger for notifying users of this.
  • Landed preview & highlight feature. You can now preview how addresses will be filled in multiple fields.
  • Landed the footer in the suggestion dropdown, which makes users easier to find the preferences page.
  • Landed basic select element support.
  • Polished the dialogs in about:preferences (two-layer in-content dialog and select element dropmark).

Photon

Performance

Structure

Animation

Visuals

Onboarding

  • The Sync tour and tour notification will land soon.

Preferences

Search

Test Pilot

  • A new version of Firefox Screenshots landed in Nightly last night with some nice bug fixes
  • Tab Center only works up to Firefox 55
  • Graduating July 5th:  Page Shot, Activity Stream
  • Graduating “soon” after July 5th:  Pulse, Tab Center
  • Keep your eyes open for three new experiments coming mid-July!

4 comments on “These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 19”

Post a comment

  1. Lula na cadeia wrote on

    Another Chrome copycat.

    ¬.¬

    Reply

  2. klop*cz wrote on

    Thank you for article. A lot of things happened, so there is a lot of space / features to explore.

    Reply

  3. Stephan Sokolow wrote on

    I’m iffy on putting the block with Add-ons, Options, and Customize above the block with Open/Save/Print.

    It’s been general practice for the last few decades to organize places like File menus which contain both document- and application-scoped actions so that the application-scoped actions (eg. Preferences, Customize) are below the document-scoped actions.

    (As I remember, it’s because the conventions were established so the menu bar and menu entries put the stuff you use more often closer to the top of the menu and the menus you use more often closer to the left end of the bar.)

    Reply

    1. Stephan Sokolow wrote on

      …and I assume the underlying purpose is to minimize the average distance your mouse has to travel after clicking to open the menu.

      (ie. Stuff in the menu that you use more often should be closer to the hamburger within the limits of grouping them meaningfully.)

      Reply

Leave a Reply to klop*cz

Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *