Startup Experience

Meta bug for Startup Experience: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=580046

Below are Issues regarding the Startup Experience, these are in order of prioritization.

Unnecessary Dialogs

Add-ons: Mossop, FF updates: Rob Strong

There are many unnecessary dialogs that get in the way when starting up. Here are some ways to improve this experience.

• Firefox updates should be done in the background. These updates should not cause new tabs or dialogs, but should rather use the new home tab for messages.
  • Champion: Rob Strong is working on this for Windows.
  • Bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=561146

• Add-ons should update in the background as well as check for updates in the background. New tabs should not be created for this, but these messages could go on the home tab (like the Firefox updates).
  • Champion: Part of the work Mossop & team is doing on the new add-ons manager
  • Bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=579990

Add-ons Performance

Talk to Nick Nguyen from AMO about what they are doing here.

Talk to Jinghua/Jono (Test Pilot) on whether there's a way to measure startup performance and correlate it with a list of add-ons (especially for 3.6.x users) to identify which add-ons add to startup time would be fantastic.

We need to check the performance of the top 10 add-ons, especially AdBlock/FlashBlock to ensure that they are not causing unnecessary startup times.

(Faaborg has a video showing that the Ebay Highlighter add-on adds 30 seconds to our startup time)

Session Restore

zpao & dolske should probably be main contacts here.

Restoring sessions has numerous issues — it makes the browser feel unresponsive, makes people unlikely to want to restart their browser, and we ask a questions about it on exit, getting in your way.

Here are some things we can do to alleviate these problems:

• Make sure we don't restore by default, and don't ask what to do on exit. Opt in via home screen instead.
  • Champion: (it could be you!)
  • Bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=561152
  • Bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=566497

• Cascading loading of tabs, we shouldn't try to load 30 tabs in parallel — have a threshold of how many tabs are loaded at once, and switch priority on-the-fly if another tab is refocused. (zpao might have a patch for this already)
  • Champion: (it could be you!)
  • Bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=561149

Time to First Action

Another part of the startup experience is how fast you can complete your first action — a search, entering a URL, etc.

Things we can do to make this experience better:

• Reduce the time it takes to focus in the URL or search bar: Always focus a blank tab, it shouldn't be possible to activate a blank tab without being in the URL or search box.
  • Champion: Frank Yan
  • Bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=565575

• Time to complete the first address entry (URL or Title match) — we should enable inline autocomplete, but make it smarter (stop after every URL element).
  • Champion: (it could be you!)
  • Bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=566489

• Locally hosted start page, so there's something visible immediately without having to hit the network.
  • Champion: (it could be you!)
  • Bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=544819

• Opening a new window is slow, about half a second on modern hardware. Is there anything we can do to make this faster?
  • Champion: (it could be you!)
  • Bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=579995

Progress Bar

Talk to Shorlander and Dao?

Here are some things we should be doing to make the progress bar better.

• The active tab should have a fast, very visible progress bar located within the location bar.
  • Champion: Stephen Horlander
  • Bug: awaiting mockups

• We should seperate progress from 'activity'. What users really want to know is "when can I interact with this page".
  • Champion: (it could be you!)
  • Bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=579999

• we should speed up the progress bar towards its end.
  • Champion: Dão Gottwald
  • Bug: I'm pretty sure this is included in the background tab progress bar stuff, but not entirely: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=544818

• wait at least 200ms before showing the progress indicator inside the Awesomebar.
  • Champion: (it could be you!)
  • Bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=579997

Window Rendering

Possibly Rob Arnold or Jim Mathis knows who to talk to

There are many ways in which we render pixels which cause the startup experience to feel slow. Here are some ways to improve.

(need: a video showing the differences in rendering between chrome/safari and Firefox)

• Closing a window with lots of tabs is slow, can we hide the window, then destroy it?

• Opening a new window is slow, is there something we can do here?

• Closing a tab is sometimes slow — can we hide the tab, then do the destruction after it's gone from view?

• Render chrome and the window in parallel
  • Champion: (it could be you!)
  • Bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=580002

• Don't render the alt title of an image before starting to load the image (looks ugly and makes the page change mid-way)
  • Champion: (it could be you!)
  • Bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=580003

• Do not switch the windows cursor on load as much, switch at most once. (flips back and forth between normal and busy several times on startup)
  • Champion: (it could be you!)
  • Bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=580006

• When shutting down Firefox close the window first (remove it from the screen), then perform the shutdown.
  • Champion: (it could be you!)
  • Bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=580007

Broken Profiles

sdwilsh has goal to get dirty profile within 20% of clean profile.

Limi has ~10 profiles coming in via the Reddit thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/ch9t5/reddit_i_asked_you_answered_mozilla_you_now_we/