Firefox/Content Performance Program

Overall Goal

Improve the performance of web content within the Firefox browsers.

Progress Updates

• October 9: Q3 update
• June 16: Announcing the Content Performance program + 1st update

Communication

Communication Type	Mechanism	Audience
Blog	https://blog.mozilla.org/vdjeric	All
IRC	#contentperf on irc.mozilla.org	devs, PMs
Mailing list	contentperf@mozilla.org	devs, PMs

First Priorities (Q3 2015)

Evaluate top sites (Aaron, Avi, Vladan)

For the initial set of sites (Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo search) + Google properties + ~5-10 other top-sites we choose ourselves from Alexa top 20, do the following:

• Agree on & write up the "most common" use-cases (i.e. user interactions) with these sites
• Evaluate relative performance (wrt other browsers) for each of these uses-cases
• Profile & determine why our performance is worse
• This evaluation will need to be repeated for Fennec & mobile versions of sites, but with a smaller subset of sites

Gfx impact on scrolling (Avi)

Re-do Aaron's scrolling measurement (using the scrolling bookmarklet) on the reference HP laptop with the 3 reference sites (Yahoo, Twitter, Facebook) using every relevant gfx configuration setting (see my blog post for list + consider Windows theme impact).

Windows 10 (Aaron)

Compare content-perf on Windows 10 vs Windows 8

Figure out how to make dynamic websites reproducible (Wander)

New page-load test (Wander)

Create a new cross-browser page-load test that measures how long it takes for the browser to become idle after loading a page (time-until-quiescent). This test could be a webpage

First Priorities (Q2 2015)

Scrolling Performance

Improve the scrolling performance of Firefox on three websites: Twitter, Facebook, and Yahoo search results. See Aaron's Write Up: Focus on two platforms: See Hardware Distribution List, Here.

• A modern and popular Windows 8.1 laptop/tablet: HP Pavilion - 14t Touch Laptop
• The most popular Android phone: Galaxy S4

Page Navigation Performance

Optimize the following page navigation experiences:

• Entering a search term in the Firefox Homepage -> Yahoo search results listing
• Entering a search term in the Firefox search box -> Yahoo search results listing
• Yahoo search results listing -> an individual search result

Again, focusing on the Windows 8.1 laptop/tablet and a particular Android phone.

Existing Benchmarks and Measures

Android

• Eideticker: http://eideticker.mozilla.org/#/android/samsung-gn/mozilla-central/nytimes-load-poststartup/timetostableframe/7
• Benchmark Results: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/Benchmarks/Oct2013
• Benchmark Raw Data: https://docs.google.com/a/mozilla.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ao22mdF2xZhudDVjQmc0c1RYMm1EVk11Q3lXZ1VMb1E&usp=sharing#gid=17

Top Issues, Firefox for Android

Full Query

ID	Priority	Summary	Status	Assigned to
942609	--	[meta] Reduce Fennec's storage impact: APK and data	RESOLVED
947390	--	[meta][project] Improve page load performance	RESOLVED
959776	P5	[meta][project] Improve startup performance	RESOLVED
979119	P5	[meta][project] Firefox for Android power consumption	RESOLVED
996062	--	[meta] Low-res and slow painting issues when scrolling subframes in Fennec	RESOLVED	Kartikaya Gupta (email:kats@mozilla.staktrace.com)
1158951	--	[meta] - Reduce memory	RESOLVED

6 Total; 0 Open (0%); 6 Resolved (100%); 0 Verified (0%);

Desktop

• Benchmarks:
• Moz bench for games: http://ouija.allizom.org/grafana/index.html#/dashboard/file/mozbench.json

Hardware

See hardware inventory, here.

• Android Hardware: Samsung Galaxy S4
• Windows Hardware:HP Pavilion 14-touch

Vladan's team should do detailed diagnosis/profiling and suggest

• engineering projects
• measurement strategies

People

• Product sponsor/driver: bsmedberg
• Engineering program manager: elan
• Technical lead(s):
  • Android: Avi Halachmi
  • Windows: Vladan Djeric Aaron Klotz and I will look at Windows.