Startup Experience

Unnecessary Dialogs

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.

• 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).

Session Restore

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.

• 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)

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.

• 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).

• Locally hosted start page, so there's something visible immediately without having to hit the network.

• Opening a new window is slow, about half a second on modern hardware. Is there anything we can do to make this faster?

Progress Bar

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.

• We should seperate progress from 'activity'. What users really want to know is "when can I interact with this page".

• we should speed up the progress bar towards it's end.

Window Rendering

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)

• Render chrome and the window in parallel

• Don't render the alt title of an image before starting to load the image (looks ugly and makes the page change mid-way)

• 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)

• When shutting down Firefox close the window first (remove it from the screen), then perform the shutdown.