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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. Probably not needed - and that's a good thing by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
  2. Feature from Opera 10 years ago by allo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Feature from Opera 10 years ago by allo · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The main problem of this is that browsers today try to manage a lot of javascript state. So this feature will start javascript threads, which opera did not in the history. prerendering html is easy, but prerendering some react site is harder.

  3. Re:Great! by theweatherelectric · · Score: 5, Interesting

    (Asking for a friend)

    Friends don't let friends use Chrome.