Performance Articles
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Firefox 61 – Quantum of Solstice
Firefox 61 is now available, bringing new performance improvements that make the fox faster than ever! We're keen on the Retained Display Lists feature to improve performance while an interactive page is painted; the Accessibility Inspector baked in to our tooling to support assistive technology users; more powerful tab management for power users; and many more Dev Tools updates and enhancements.
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Retained Display Lists for improved page performance
Display list building is the process in which we collect the set of high-level items to display on screen (borders, backgrounds, text and much more), and then sort the list, according to CSS painting rules, into the correct back-to-front order. By retaining the display list and only reloading the assets that have changed since first paint, we are able to optimize painting performance especially for highly interactive pages. Look for this feature in this week's release of Firefox 61.
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CDN, BCD, and SVG: MDN Changelog for April 2018
The MDN engineering team reports on work accomplished in April and what's ahead in May. Some highlights: MDN Web Docs site moved to a CDN, improving page load time by 16%. The migration of browser compatibility data (the BCD project) continues apace, and is now 72% done. The team began the work of replacing font-based icons with inline SVG; the work to improve accessibility and localization with SVG icons continues. In April, 510 pull requests were merged, including 140 pull requests from 57 new contributors.
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Oxidizing Source Maps with Rust and WebAssembly
A detailed look at how we replaced the most performance-sensitive portions of the
source-mapJavaScript Library’s source map parser with Rust code that is compiled to WebAssembly. The results: The WebAssembly is up to 5.89 times faster than the JavaScript implementation on realistic benchmarks operating on real world source maps! Additionally, performance is also more consistent: relative standard deviations decreased. We hope that, by sharing our experience, we inspire others rewrite performance-sensitive JavaScript in Rust via WebAssembly. -
Actual Input Latency: cross-browser measurement and the Hasal testing framework
Editor’s Note: This post is also featured on the 2017 Performance Calendar. This is a story about an engineering team at Mozilla, based in Taipei, that was tasked with measuring performance and solving some specific performance bottlenecks in Firefox. It is also a story about user-reported performance issues that were turned into actionable insights. It […]
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Comparing Browser Page Load Time: An Introduction to Methodology
On blog.mozilla.org, we shared results of a speed comparison study to show how fast Firefox Quantum with Tracking Protection enabled is compared to other browsers. In this companion post, we share some insights into the methodology behind these page load time comparison studies and benchmarks. Our study focused on news web sites, which tend to come with an abundance of trackers, and uses the Navigation Timing API as a data source.
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A super-stable WebVR user experience thanks to Firefox Quantum
The Quantum release incorporates major optimizations from Quantum Flow, an holistic effort to modernize and improve the foundations of the Firefox web engine by identifying and removing the main sources of jank without rewriting everything from scratch. Quantum Flow has had an important and noticeable effect on WebVR stability and performance, as Salva demonstrates in this article.
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Intersection Observer comes to Firefox
What do infinite scrolling, lazy loading, and online advertisements all have in common? They need to know about—and react to—the visibility of elements on a page! Unfortunately, knowing whether or not an element is visible has traditionally been difficult on the Web. Most solutions listen for scroll and resize events, then use DOM APIs like […]
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Optimizing Performance of A-Frame Scenes for Mobile Devices
A-Frame makes building 3D and VR web applications easy, so developers of all skill levels can create rich and interactive virtual worlds. For an Oregon State University student project focused on WebVR, our team investigated performance and optimizations for A-Frame on Android smartphones. We developed a means of benchmarking the level of 3D complexity a mobile phone is capable of, and determining which performance metrics are required for such a benchmark.
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Designing for performance: A data-informed approach for Quantum development
What makes work on performance so challenging and why is it so important to include the user from the very beginning? This article explores the difference between technical and perceived performance, and describes an approach to testing and measurement that correlates the user's quality of experience with characteristics that engineers can benchmark.
