Swipe Animations on Firefox

Swipe Animations on Firefox

I wrote awhile ago about how a few of us, lead by Stephen Pohl, were working on swipe animations like Safari does for Firefox. Well, as that patch is about done, I took my own initiative. Adding that cool animation on all platforms.

Obviously, we can't add the gesture swiping on Windows and Linux, but I noted that we do have the back and forward buttons, which just flash you back to different pages. What if we use those buttons and animate away the page, similar to Game Center.

So I did, and months later, it is about done. I just need a review+ and I'm set. Of course, I still need a few bugs to land first, the original bug that covers gesture swiping on OS X, and one that fixes Canvas.toBlob to happen off the main thread (increases performance).

But I must say, this patch is working wonderfully. There will of course be some issues, but those will get fixed as it lands on Nightly. And if you hate animations and am starting to begrudge me for even starting this, don't worry, you can turn this off easily, you don't even need to go into about:config.

Just go to Preferences -> Advanced -> General, and you will see the check box.

This experience has been a good one. I have learned a lot just from this single bug. Mozilla codebase, Javascript, CSS, and more.