Snappy, June 7

Notes.

Justin’s FUEL fix will help add-ons avoid leaks and shutdown hangs: bug 750454.

Jared plans to start landing Australis tab strip (738491) on UX branch this week. Australis is our new, faster UI theme.

We landed a cache locking fix recently (722034), but telemetry is now showing a regression (761736), so this will likely be backed out and reworked.

Vladan blogged about first results from our non-destructive chromehang. Last year we briefly caused our nightly to crash if it hung for over 30seconds, which got us a lot of useful data (and some of the initial snappy bugs). This piggybacked on our crash-handling infrastructure so it was a very effective experiment (a bit brutal though). Vladan spent time this year working on plumbing to get the same sort of data non-destructively. As a result we are looking to turn on frame pointers in nightly builds and dial down hang detection to 5 seconds (bug 763124).

5 comments

  1. Nicholas Nethercote

    Nitpick: Can you give people’s surnames? Often the first name alone doesn’t distinguish the patch author. Thanks!

  2. I take it you meant “now showing a regression”?

  3. Caspy thanks, fixed.

    Nick, will do last names in the future.

  4. Hi. 738491 seems to imply the Australis tab strip work is pushed to UX, but I downloaded today’s UX and still see the usual tab strip.

    Is the new strip supposed to be visible in the latest UX build? Do I need to set a parameter in about:config to test it?

    Thanks for the great work, and for sharing the news :)

  5. Please have a look into animated GIFs. Since version 15 I get a pretty bad responsiveness when many animated GIFs are on a web page (e.g. in forum editors). Every interaction with the browser is really really slow. Characters are much laters shown when i tip them into the text box. The animations of the GIFs are also running much slower.

    Everything goes away when I deactivated the hardware acceleration.

    The same profile uses in Firefox 13 and 14 does not show this behaviour.

    I am using Windows 7 64 bit on an AMD K8 machine with a Radeon HD 3200 (Catalyst 12.4).