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Mozilla Tests Firefox 'Tab Warming' (bleepingcomputer.com)

Posted by msmash on from the next-up dept.

Catalin Cimpanu, reporting for BleepingComputer: Mozilla is currently testing a new feature called "Tab Warming" that engineers hope will improve the tab switching process. According to a description of the feature, Tab Warming will watch the user's mouse cursor and start "painting" content inside a tab whenever the user hovers his mouse over one. Firefox will do this on the assumption the user wants to click and switch to view that tab and will want to keep a pre-rendered tab on hand if this occurs. "Those precious milliseconds are used to do the rendering and uploading, so that when the click event finally comes, the [tab] is ready and waiting for you," said Mike Conley, one of the Firefox engineers who worked on this feature.

4 of 170 comments (clear)

  1. Great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Let's bloat the browser down EVEN MORE rather than making something efficient that people want to use...or cleaning up the UI to make it clean and not confusing.
     
    Firesux still leads Chrone on trashiness.

    1. Re:Great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I still want my title bar back. Both of those browsers suck balls. I find it patronizing that you can't even see but 5% of a site's title anymore. When you have a dozen tabs open, there is no way to find what you really have open anymore aside from clicking over each one.
       
      This is what happens when you leave your design to a bunch of mouthbreathers rather than designers. Desktop users still have a mouse and keyboard after several decades. Quit redesigning the UI as if the computer can now scan your brain and tell what you are feeling. A browser UI from 1998 would work better than a browser UI from 2018, and the Web has changed enormously in that amount of time.

    2. Re:Great! by Aighearach · · Score: 5, Insightful

      One step forwards, two steps backwards. Repeat until bloat unmanageable, then rewrite and promise performance will be recovered over time.

    3. Re:Great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      That doesn't solve the problem though. I now end up with a bunch of hidden tabs that are essentially off screen. And if they stay on the screen, they take more and more real estate.
       
      I need to be able to see the full title bar. So having bigger tabs helps to give a hint of what I'm looking at, but having a full title bar is still an obvious necessity to see what I'm looking at. I might be knee deep in kernel documentation and not want to lose my spot of what chapter I'm in by scrolling up to the top. Or I might have open a bunch of Stack Overflow tabs that I want to keep open while I'm trying to answer a really nasty compiler error problem.
       
      Currently in Chrome, it's so bad by default that if you have a bunch of tabs open, the icon disappears in your current window and is replaced with an X to kill the tab, so there is NO WAY of seeing the title.