Application features overview
This is an overview of the Firefox for iOS features in the application, from a user and UI perspective. This overview will not go into each feature in depth, but the goal is that after reading this page, you’ll know the most important ones we’re currently working on, and can hopefully know what's being referred to in ticket descriptions. Please note that we do use A/B testing and UI experiments so the UI that you see in development as a contributor might differ from what you see in production. For ease, this document will refer to what is most likely seen in production at the time of writing.
If you have any questions or think this page needs updating, please feel free to post any questions on our: Element Channel
The Firefox Homepage is main part of the application. You can reach this page by clicking the plus button/home button (depending on your settings), by clicking on the URL bar when you want to start a new search, or when you open the application (with the start at home feature). What you see on the Homepage is all customizable. You can hide sections (via homepage settings) that you don’t want to see.
Sections currently appear in this order:
- Firefox logo
- Shortcuts
- Contains sites based on your frequently visited sites. You can pin some sites in there as well. This section also contains a special Google tile by default (due to partnership), and sponsored tiles (users can turn them off).
- Jump back in
- Shows up to bring you to your recent tabs, and tabs synced from other devices, so you can jump back into them and continue what you were doing
- Bookmarks
- Contains sites you recently bookmarked
- Popular today
- Contains suggested news stories and articles
- Long pressing on some tiles brings a contextual menu (ex: long press on a shortcuts tiles or top sites tiles)
- Some sections have different layouts if you’re on iPhone, iPad, landscape or portrait mode.
- The Jump Back In section is hidden in private mode
The tab tray contains different types of tabs like normal tabs, private tabs and tabs synced from other devices (with a Mozilla Account). It can be opened by clicking on the square with a number icon in the navigation toolbar.
- Delete all tabs or close old tabs with the trash icon
- Delete single tabs by clicking on the tab's X button or swiping to close
- Create a new tab with the + button.
- Tabs in the tabs tray can be long pressed to be reordered.
- In private mode you can have 0 tabs, but in normal tabs you’ll always have a minimum of 1 tab (if you delete all tabs, a homepage will be created).
- You can long press the tab tray icon in the toolbar to switch mode between private and normal. You can also open a new tab from this menu.
This covers the history, bookmarks, downloads and reading list panels. This page can be opened from the top bar of the app menu.
We have a lot of hidden actions when you long press icons.
Can be accessed by long pressing the back or forward arrow when you have navigation history within a tab.
This can be accessed by long pressing the tab tray icon. You can open a new private or normal tab from there.
You can copy the URL bar address.
When you start typing, you get to see suggestions. Suggestions gets filled in and adjusted when you type. You can see different type of suggestions (apart from the normal search suggestions):
- From your bookmarks
- From your recent history
- From your opened tabs
- From your remote tabs
We also have widgets and quick actions to trigger different actions into the app.
Force a website to be dark.
Find in page enables the user to search in a web page for some words, available under the Settings menu.
Reader mode is a distraction-free web reader. Text font, size and color can be adjusted. Reader Mode pages can be saved in the reader mode panel to be read later on. Long press on the lightning bold icon on the URL bar to activate Reader Mode.
Can be triggered using a shaking your device side to side (if enabled) or the Lightning Bolt in the URL bar - used to summarize a page with AI. Can be enabled or disabled in the Settings menu.
Can be accessed from the Settings where it says Protections are On/Off
In code you might see this as FxA which means Firefox Accounts. With an account you can sync tabs, passwords and send links to your other devices and whatnot. You can sign in from the settings and tabs tray synced tabs page.
We heavily utilize feature flags and AB testing during development and rollout of features. If during development you are seeing UI that you don't see in production this could be a new feature that is under development and only enabled on developer or beta builds. You can toggle your settings by going to the the secret debug menu that's only available on beta and development builds.