Application overview
This wiki page has the goal to give an overview of the Firefox for iOS features we have 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 we’re discussing during meetings and planning.
The Firefox Homepage is central in the application. You can reach this page by clicking the home button, 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 remove sections that you don’t want to see.
Sections currently appears in this order:
- Firefox logo
- Top sites
- 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 we recently added sponsored tiles in there too (users can turn them off).
- Recently saved
- Contains sites you recently bookmarked or saved in your reading list
- Jump back in
- Shows up to bring you to your recent tabs, so you can jump back into them and continue what you were doing
- Recently visited
- Also called history highlights. As it says, it highlights items from your history according to their weight (based on how often you went, time spent, etc).
- Thought-provoking stories
- Contains pocket suggested stories
- Customize homepage button
- Brings you to the settings page
- Long pressing on some tiles brings a contextual menu (ex: long press on a top sites tiles or pocket tile)
- Some sections have different layouts if you’re on iPhone, iPad, landscape or portrait mode.
- The Firefox home page in private mode has some sections hidden (ex: jump back in and history highlight).
The tabs tray contains different types of tabs like normal tabs, private tabs and tabs synced from other devices (with a Firefox Sync account). It can be opened by clicking on the square with a number icon in the toolbar bar.
- You can delete all tabs with the garbage icon or by clicking on the tab X icon, or create a new tab with the + icon.
- Tabs in the tabs tray can be long pressed to reorder them.
- 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, download and reading list panels. This page can be mostly opened from the hamburger menu (there’s actually an extra option to open the bookmarks panel on iPad).
Note that it's possible in the history panel to search for history items.
We have a lot of hidden actions when you long press some icons.
Can be accessed by long pressing the back or forward arrow when you have navigation history within a tab.
Menu to change from private to normal mode, or vice versa. Also, can open or close tabs from there. This can be accessed by long pressing the tab tray icon.
You get those different actions
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 At the bottom of the search view controller, you can see the search engine list. It enables user to make a search with a different search engine directly after typing what they want to search.
You can scan a QR code with Firefox iOS, either from the URL bar or from quick actions.
We also have widgets and quick actions to trigger different actions into the app.
Force a website to be dark. It’s currently done by inverting the colors on the page. It’s not perfect since a website that is already dark will be inverted to white, and some images can get inverted too. Can be turned on from the hamburger menu.
Find in page enables the user to search in a web page for some words.
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.
Can be accessed by clicking on the lock icon in the URL bar, or from the settings.
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.
