109188 - investigate the effect of early main window creation

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: XUL, defect)

Description

[Cathleen]

trudelle, this is an old item from earlier perf meeting.  Just another idea to
throw around.  

Do you have bandwidth to help us investigate if this is something we should look
into for perception improvements (for startup)?

Comment 1

[Peter Trudelle]

Could you elaborate?  I'm not even sure what this means.

Comment 2

[Matthew T (active 1999-2002)]

I was just discussing this with Bryner, and apparently we delay the opening of a
window until all XUL, CSS, and JS in it are loaded. It would certainly be a Bad
Thing (highly disconcerting) for chrome to be laid out incrementally, however
that should not prevent the window frame from appearing as soon as we know the
size and position of the window, rather than waiting for all the chrome to load.
(For main windows such as Navigator, the size of the window presumably does not
depend on the chrome within it.)

MSIE on Windows concentrates on putting up a browser window as fast as possible,
before the layout engine has loaded (there's just an empty hole in the middle of
the window), and before all the menus have been populated (compare the contents
of the `Tools' menu before and after the home page finishes loading). Similarly,
MSIE on Mac OS opens the browser window frame before connecting to the Internet;
Mozilla insists on establishing an Internet connection -- or at least thoroughly
failing to do so -- before loading the chrome, which in turn blocks the opening
of the window (bug 42952).

Comment 3

[Peter Trudelle]

->bryner, who has apparently already started on it :-)

Comment 4

[David Hyatt]

IMO we should not do this.  This will look really lame and unprofessional.  
I know because we've had bugs that have caused the window to show 
when it didn't have the chrome loaded, and it looks horrible.

Comment 5

[Brian Ryner (not reading)]

talked about this with hyatt, we decided this would look too ugly for any
potential perceived speedup.