Lack of Updates

I skipped a Snappy update two-weeks ago (did anyone notice?) due to not having any completed work to report. Snappy has not stagnated, we have big projects inflight see this week’s notes for some details.

Tab Smoothness

I usually do not cover in-flight work in Snappy updates and expect individual developers to blog about stuff they are working on. However, Avi Halachmi has delayed blogging to focus on quickly advancing Firefox performance, an exception had to me made.

Avi has been investigating tab smoothness since December. His approach relies on detailed instrumentation + sending captured data via Telemetry. This culminated in some exciting bug activity this week:

• bug 828097 According to Telemetry, Firefox tab animations are quite smooth (due to recent improvements like bug 731974) iff one has the newtab thumbnail feature disabled (via button in top right of the page).
• bug 843853 was filed to fix above performance hit ASAP.
• bug 838758 20-25% tab animation speedup on Direct2D-accelerated systems.
• bug 842967, bug 590422 improve animation scheduling.

Due to web-like Firefox UI architecture most of these improvements will enable smoother website perf.

Avi, Matthew Noorenberghe, Mike Conley are working on optimizing our next UI refresh: Australis. Australis is shaping up to be the most perf-tuned theme update we’ve done. See bug 837885 for how performance is being tracked.

As Avi’s manager I found it trying to see weeks of perf-reporting work with no fixes to accompany it. I’m happy to see this investigation investment pay off and serve an example of importance of methodically studying performance before proceeding to optimization.