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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 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.
One step forwards, two steps backwards. Repeat until bloat unmanageable, then rewrite and promise performance will be recovered over time.
... what could possibly go wrong?
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.
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.
I need to be able to see the full title bar.
Firefox solves your problem. Go Hamburger menu -> Customize -> Check the Title Bar check box and click Done. You'll have the full title bar on your window.
(Asking for a friend)
Friends don't let friends use Chrome.
They're not even right. The most likely reason someone hovers over a tab is because they're waiting for the yellow pop-up to show the full title of the tab so we know whether this is the right one or not. What's the odds that it'll now take even longer to see the full title of the tab.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
For decades, browser scientists warned us this was coming. We had simple static pages, but no that wasn't enough for us. We needed dynamic content. We needed javascript.
Suddenly we had all this free computation. It was exhilirating. We could make hampsters dance and punch the monkey to win. But that computation had a cost. We kept burning more and more CPU cycles.
Browser scientists raised the alarm. All those cycles produced heat. At first our fans dissipated it, but they couldn't keep it. Eventually the heat crept into the rest of the system. They told us it would lead to tab warming. We just laughed and loaded more instagram kittens.
Who's laughing now? Our tabs are getting so hot they overflow into other programs. Their behavior is increasingly erratic and unpredictable. Now we have rogue sites mining cryptocurrency in them. Face it, our tabs are damaged beyond repair, unable to sustain simple online email anymore.
Like Icarus, we flew too close to the sun. We have no one to blame but ourselves.
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch.
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.
Does this mean whenever I start moving the mouse around Firefox is going to madly start running a bunch of javascript, spinning my CPU up to full?
Ye gods. Delay in switching to a new tab is not an issue.
A huge amount of work was done to stop the Firefox UI from blocking on the activities of content processes, as part of the multiprocess work that shipped up to and including FF 57. It's pretty good now although there are probably a few lingering bugs.
What makes you think loading is "poorly optimized"? A lot of modern Web pages are bloated, but that isn't Firefox's fault.
One example is using a computer whose policies are set to allow temporary installation of third-party JavaScript code into the browser's RAM and disk cache by websites visited by ordinary users but not permanent installation of third-party native code into persistent storage by ordinary users.
Or get back to actually doing your job?
What did you mean by this? A break room computer at work is not the only environment that restricts installation of native applications. Another is a computer at a public library. A third is a computer using an uncommon architecture for which the application's publisher has not compiled the native application, such as GNU/Linux on ARM instead of x86-64. From Google Earth on a Pi? - Raspberry Pi Forums: