1036929 - Panel animations are slower on Mac than they are on Windows

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Toolkit :: UI Widgets, defect, P4)

Description

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

When I compare the panel animations in Nightly on Mac and on any of my Windows VMs, the Mac version is noticeably less smooth, even though Windows is slowed down by running inside a VM.
I wonder if we can achieve the same performance on Mac as we have on Windows.

Comment 1

[Markus Stange [:mstange]]

The panel shadow can probably be blamed for this, at least partly. On Mac we don't hardware accelerate panels (windows of type "popup") because their shadow is shaped around the panel content, and if we use OpenGL to render the window contents we lose the dynamic shaping ability. But this is only the case if the window server draws the shadow - if we instead set -moz-window-shadow:none; and drew our own shadow (with box-shadow, for example), we could enable hardware acceleration for the panel and the animation should be much smoother.

Comment 2

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

This has gotten quite a bit worse with Yosemite.
Now the animations aren't just slower, the panel shadow appears first without any animation and then the panel expands. Plus, there's often a »blink« at the end of the transition where the panel disappears for a split second (but not the shadow) and then reappears.

Markus, how do you see the chances of this getting attention?
Apple is usually pretty fast in converting their user base to new OS versions.

Comment 3

[Markus Stange [:mstange]]

Yeah, it really does look hideous on Yosemite. I'll check what happens if we do our own drop shadow drawing and use GL acceleration for the panels, when I have time.

Comment 4

[Blake Winton (:bwinton) (:☕️)]

(Marking it as assigned, so that I can filter on unassigned bugs a little easier.  ;)

Comment 5

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

Hm, this got even worse in the last few Nightlies. I now only get about 2-3 frames of animation for panel opening. Sometimes there's no animation at all.
Older versions of Firefox are slightly smoother.

Markus, how is this doing priority-wise at the moment?

Comment 6

[Wilson Page [:wilsonpage]]

Bug 1252224 may be dupe.

Comment 7

[Wilson Page [:wilsonpage]]

Screencasts from bug 1252224:

- attachment 8725764 [details]
- attachment 8724895 [details]

Comment 8

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

Do you still see this issue, phlsa?

Comment 9

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

Nope! It seems to be fixed now!