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Mozilla Tests Firefox 'Tab Warming' (bleepingcomputer.com)
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.
A realize it is probably a different team but they could spend some time improving the Android version -- it is too damn slow. I really don't have a problem on Windows and if they're trying to eek out milliseconds in UI response there, maybe put the effort to shaving seconds off of the Android interface.
I actually tried out Chrome for a bit after Mozilla pulled it's Mr. Robot stunt, but came back to Firefox after noticing how much better it performed than Chrome, which was somewhat surprising to me. I had assumed they were at performance parity. At this point, I think Mozilla has the top performing browser by metrics that tend to matter in real life. The one I notice the most is that Firefox's UI rarely stutters when loading a page, while Chrome hitches and hangs in short bursts, making things feel sluggish. I think that makes a huge difference in the perception of speed and performance.
Tabs switch almost instantly for me, and that's on a nine year old PC with a moderately slow internet connection. So while I'm glad Mozilla is looking at important things like performance (instead of yet another pointless UI revamp), it almost seems unnecessary at this point. Has anyone else noticed any sort of delay when switching tabs?
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Opera just cached the rendered version of all open tabs. This is part why it were the fastes browser of its time.
And they even cached the rendered version of pages in the history. A faster back button is not possible.
(Asking for a friend)
Friends don't let friends use Chrome.
For you and me, sure. My wife hovers over anything for a few seconds before she either clicks it, or second guesses herself and stops to think about if there is a way to do what she wants without clicking anything.
The difference is, she won't notice the speed difference because she's not as plugged in to the technical details and doesn't have a lot of performance expectations. Whereas I would see the network traffic, notice the mouse pointer slightly lagging as FF does it poorly-optimized loading process.
What I'd actually like them to work on is just separating the frontend and backend performance so that the UI doesn't lag when the DOM isn't ready. The page should be able to lag without the whole interface lagging, after all the rest of the interface is local, and the total resources used by it are low enough that overall efficiency only takes a slight hit to leave the menus responsive at all times.