1108483 - Pause or throttle SWF content that is off screen or in background tabs

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox Graveyard :: Shumway, defect)

Description

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

Pause or throttling unseen SWF content would improve Firefox responsiveness and reduce power usage. SWF content that is playing audio may need to be exempt so users can continue listening to audio from unseen SWF content.

Comment 1

[Till Schneidereit [:till]]

We should probably talk to whoever implemented the throttling heuristics for JS that we've had in Firefox for quite a while now. Perhaps we can even simply use them somehow. I don't, however, know who worked on this.

Comment 2

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

bz says:

Gecko's throttling policies are as follows:

1)  Nested setTimeout/setInterval is throttled to a rate determined by the "dom.min_background_timeout_value", defaulting to 1000ms wait time between invocations of the repeating timer.

2)  The refresh driver (and hence requestAnimationFrame) is throttled to 1Hz initially, period-doubling every time it fires, more or less.  The policy is a bit more complicated, since different tabs can actually affect each other.

Note that we don't do any throttling for JS right now in the "scrolled off screen" case.

Comment 3

[Till Schneidereit [:till]]

It sounds like we just need to get throttling working for OOP iframes and should be pretty much set.

We might want to at least look into throttling things that are outside the viewable area of a page, though. While that wouldn't immediately help with responsiveness of web content (because Shumway won't block it anyway), it'll leave us with more resources for the Flash content that's actually visible.

Comment 4

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

Make bugs with "[shumway-fb2]" whiteboard tag block shumway-fb2 meta bug 1110300.