Startup Experience

From MozillaWiki
Jump to navigation Jump to search

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.

  • 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:
    • Bug: no bug found, need to file one.

Session Restore

zpao should probably be main contact 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:

  • 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

Engage dolske/zpao/Frank Yan on these?

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:

  • 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

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.
  • 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.
  • wait at least 200ms before showing the progress bar inside the Awesomebar

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)

  • 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.

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)

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/

Retrieved from "https://wiki.mozilla.org/index.php?title=Startup_Experience&oldid=238574"