SUMO Problem investigation
There was an increase in negative feedback regarding Firefox 11 beta relative to Firefox 10 beta on SUMO. Cheng and me will be analyzing SUMO reports to see if we can find a concrete regression or two in Firefox 11.
(One of the reasons this update is late is because I was digging through our telemetry data looking for something to correlate with user reports)
Cycle Collector + GC
Olli and Jan cooked up (as part of MemShrink?) about:ccdump addon for assist with finding leaks (bug 726346, bug 728669). See Jan’s blog post for more details.
Andrew is working on:
- reducing how often cycle collector runs in worst-case scenarios, bug 710496
- A fix that might increase the time between cyclecollector runs 10x, bug 728460, 728547
- Triggering GC from CC less often, bug 727965
Bill landed incremental GC this week, bug 719492. Most users will not benefit from incremental GC until Bill finishes up handling frequent “corner cases” that end up disabling incremental GC.
DOM
Kyle is adding infrastructure to allow webpages to wait on local storage without blocking user interactions, see 729769.
Profiling
Vlad’s non-destructive chromehang got mostly r+ed, bug 712109.
Frontend
Livemarks will soon be async, bug 613588. What are livemarks? An example of a livemark is the bbc livefeed/folder that we used ship on the bookmarks toolbar. Turned out when we rewrote the UI to hide the bookmarks toolbar, the livemark was still alive and well, hogging the UI while doing disk IO. We took out the default livemark a few releases back, now the code is being converted so users with preexisting bbc livemark (or their own livemarks) don’t suffer accompanying browser lag.
Scrolling
Avi ported his smoothscroll logic to C++, Jared pushed it to the UX branch, bug 206438. If you are interested in fluid scrolling, give it a try, play with acceleration prefs to help us find optimal values. Once this is done, bug 629507 is next and then we get to tell the rest of the browser to not interrupt scrolling/etc in bug 712478. If any readers are interested in helping desktop browsers catch up to mobile levels of responsiveness, this is area is a good place to contribute to.

