1351413 - Disable animations/transitions based on Windows Experience Index

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: General, enhancement, P3)

Description

[(Currently slow to respond) Philipp Sackl [:phlsa] (Firefox UX) please use needinfo]

The Windows Experience Score is what Microsoft uses to enable/disable certain features of Windows (like glass) based on machine performance.

We need to figure out whether we could use this score in order to automatically disable some animations and effects that might get choppy on slow hardware.

I think there are a few questions here:
- Can we access the WES from Firefox?
- Which animations/effects should we disable based on that index?
- What are the threshold values for the various animations/effects?

Comment 1

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

> I think there are a few questions here:
> - Can we access the WES from Firefox?

I would add: Should we just detect choppy UI animations ourselves? This would be a more direct hint -- who knows what factors into the Windows Experience Score -- and work across platforms.

Comment 2

[(Currently slow to respond) Philipp Sackl [:phlsa] (Firefox UX) please use needinfo]

Right! It's probably a trade-off between the limitations of WES and the effort of building something new entirely.

Comment 3

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

Bug 1351755 should be evaluated separately and not block this one.

Comment 4

[Virtual_ManPL [:Virtual] 🇵🇱 - (please needinfo? me - so I will see your comment/reply/question/etc.)]

I would recommend providing also the preference to control this feature in Options or at least in about:config.

Comment 5

[Evelyn Hung]

@Tina, I remember we have something similar to comment 4 in new preference design?

Comment 6

[Tina Hsieh[:Tina_Hsieh] UX]

Yes, we're going to have a performance section in about:preferences. I think this bug is more about the feature to automatically disable animations, so I'll suggest sticking the discussion of the manual options to Bug 1354473.

Comment 8

[:Gijs (he/him)]

(In reply to (Currently slow to respond) Philipp Sackl [:phlsa] (Firefox UX) please use needinfo from comment #0)
> The Windows Experience Score is what Microsoft uses to enable/disable
> certain features of Windows (like glass) based on machine performance.

What's your source for this? From looking around the internet [0][1][2], Windows 7 disabled aero even on extremely high spec machines (so with high WEI scores). It did so purely based on machine load. That's different from the experience score, which is completely static and meant to measure purely the capabilities of the hardware.

As far as I can tell, the Windows Experience Index was automatically provided on Windows 7 and Windows 8, but it's no longer there by default on Windows 8.1 and Windows 10. You can manually run the diagnostics that produce these scores, and they will produce XML files at a given location on disk.

We could potentially do this from within Firefox, but it seems like it'd make more sense to simply get some idea about the machine's CPU + RAM, disk size and graphics systems ourselves, rather than running a potentially draining performance test on the actual hardware.

As a result, I'm tempted to suggest wontfix as filed, though we'll definitely keep looking into making Firefox automatically adjust some things based on system characteristics. Mike/Philipp, thoughts?

[0] https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-performance/windows-7-aero-disabled-due-to-performance/40dd1cca-cd9d-4fe1-8f67-ed28651bf652
[1] https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-pictures/windows-7-automatically-switching-to-basic-non/7f4917ff-135d-40e4-866b-ac760642763f
[2] https://superuser.com/questions/270453/how-can-i-prevent-windows-from-disabling-aero

(In reply to Dão Gottwald [::dao] from comment #1)
> > I think there are a few questions here:
> > - Can we access the WES from Firefox?
> 
> I would add: Should we just detect choppy UI animations ourselves? This
> would be a more direct hint -- who knows what factors into the Windows
> Experience Score -- and work across platforms.

I think this is something we should consider, but as the links show, there are issues with this type of approach, too... Additionally, we should arguably change our behavior before the machine gets overloaded, and we've definitely had reports where animations might not be choppy, but showing them smoothly is draining a bunch of CPU that would be better put to other uses - so it's a balancing act. :-)

Comment 9

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

I agree - the Windows Experience Index sounds like it'll not be as useful (or accessible) to us as we might have first thought.

I suspect we should concoct our own formula to determine when we're running on constrained hardware (or under other constrained conditions).

Comment 10

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

(to be clear, I'm agreeing to WONTFIX as filed)

Comment 11

[William Lachance (:wlach)]

If we close this, should we reopen bug 1359929 (or file a new bug, whichever)?

Comment 12

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

Either will do. Gijs is currently doing investigations on how we can potentially identify constrained hardware. Once that exits the research stage, I suspect it'll get turned into bugs.

Comment 13

[Sylvestre Ledru [:Sylvestre]]

Clearing needinfo as Phlsa is no longer at Mozilla