Perceived Performance

The aim for the "Perceived Performance" effort is to identify changes we can make that will make Firefox feel faster — as opposed to the classic optimizations that generally involve rewriting code to make it faster. In these cases, there are definitely elements of code improvement involved, but it's not the main reason why things seem faster.

Add your ideas for things we should look at to make Firefox feel faster below:

• Load the frontmost tab on startup before the others (filed as bug 496458)
• Don't show the progress spinner for the address bar until 200-300ms have passed (it currently appears instantly, and makes it feel like you're waiting for results).
• Color change impact when creating a new tab
• Startup order, what tasks are performed on startup, and is there anything we can defer in order to make the startup experience faster?
• Switching tabs while loading several tabs seems slow
• Deleting history items has lag. Make them dissapear when delete is pressed, then delete them.
• Move awesome bar loading to occur before most other async tasks that happen, Almost always when I open a new firefox the urlbar is frozen (I type some chars and nothing is shown). This gives a very slugish impression. (santagada)
• Related to above (switching tabs), allow/improve tab switching when loading particularly intensive pages. (eg. FF appears to lock up at times when loading http://fixoutlook.org/ as it's contending with many images, etc).