Our last meeting was last Thursday, at 11am PST (meeting notes). This blog post is late because of a combination of email disasters and travel.
Cheng from the SUMO team mined SUMO inputs to see what our users are complaining most about. There were complaints about things were slow, unresponsive, frozen, etc. See meeting notes the complete blurb.
The networking team has identified issues leading to slow shutdown and startup.
Most of the the responsiveness profiler landed.
UX team provided an extensive list of Firefox features that needed tweaking, see meeting notes for details. We are working on improving tab interactions and scrolling.
I’ll post a beefier summary of plans/accomplishments next week.
Tags: snappy
Your “last Thursday” link points to the initial November meeting instead of https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/Snappy/2011-12-08
When I’ve left the browser alone for a while, not too sure how long, I often get a 5 to 10 seconds lag waiting for the awesome bar to build itself when I click on the drop menu. This always involves heavy disk reads. Firefox should never do that. As handy as searching history via the location bar can be, I tend to access a handful of similar sites via the drop-menu of the location bar. These sites are usually the most frequently visited and thus are listed in the location bar drop menu without scrolling. The drop-menu of the awesome bar should be more static when accessed from the drop-menu. There’s no need to load all the places history into memory, causing the huge lag, when all I want to do is access one of the top 8 sites that are always listed immediately upon opening the awesome bar.
Hmm, not sure I’ve explained this very well. Put it this way, the awesome bar drop menu is like having top 8 most-frequently-visited bookmarks menu. This top 8 does not change all that often. It should not take 5 to 10 seconds of lag to load it!
From the summary, I think you’ve totally missed the problem with scrolling smoothness. The big problem isn’t with scrolling physics or smooth scrolling, the big problem is that when the main thread blocks, scrolling blocks. Short blocks that aren’t visible elsewhere become painfully obvious when you’re scrolling.
I’ve had a couple times recently were something went leak crazy, using up an extra 2GB of memory, and every time I noticed because my scrolling started stuttering like hell (presumably due to long GC pauses).
I frequently have trackpad and keyboard scrolling stop working, but when I drag the scrollbar they start working again. That’s the sort of scrolling problem I’m seeing.