A couple of months ago Stuart casually asked me to investigate Fennec performance for moving about a page, zooming and loading pages in general. Beta 1 contains the result of that:
- There is little to no hardware graphics acceleration on mobile arm device. That combined with low memory bandwidth results in painfully slow screen updates (10x slower than crappy gfx on the desktop?). The painting engine now works hard to skip redundant draws of the page.
- During loading pages or zooming Fennec now only draws the minimum required. In my testing complicated pages load 2-5 times faster. Zooming is now 5 times faster.
- There is less DOM querying now. Things like checking an element’s size can cause pages to reflow resulting in a less responsive UI
Other performance highlights:
- Fennec now features a redesigned firstrun page which not only looks better, but also contributed to a 0.5second startup speedup. Overall Beta 1 should startup is almost a second quicker than the previous release
- The JavaScript JIT is now on by default providing a noticeable performance boost throughout Fennec.
For more info on Fennec Beta 1 and where to get it see Stuart’s blog.
How much can “upstream” gecko benefit from this, ie can your work make Firefox rendering on the desktop even quicker?
I’d like to second Bernie’s question. Sounds like some very exciting optimizations are happening in Fennac!
Most of the really massive optimizations are fennec-specific as they have to do with refining the drawing-through-canvas model.
The more minor improvements are often shared with firefox, but those are less visible on desktop platforms than on slower arm devices.