112559 - [mach] Missing splash screen in mach-o build

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core Graveyard :: Cmd-line Features, enhancement, P2)

Description

[Josh Aas]

When a mach-o build for Mac OS X is compiled, there is no splash screen 
at all.

Comment 1

[Brian Ryner (not reading)]

Most likely because nsNativeAppSupportMac isn't compiled with mach-o builds...

Comment 2

[Paul Chen]

I don't think that I'll get to this anytime soon. Reassigning to sdagley.

Comment 3

[Zach Lipton [:zach]]

ALL YOUR MACH-O ARE BELONGS TO ME

How much work would it take to add in nsNativeAppSupportMac? Do we 
want it?

Comment 4

[Arne Scheffler]

I think this is more a feature than a bug

Comment 5

[Josh Aas]

This may be a feature to some, but I need it. Lets face it - its not as if 
Mozilla starts up so fast that the splash screen is unnecessary as an 
indicator of activity.

Comment 6

[Steve Dagley]

over to zach so he can decide if it's important - I've got CFM fish to fry at the 
moment

Comment 7

[Zach Lipton [:zach]]

qa to sdagley, it wouldn't be fair for me to be both owner and qa... 

Personally, I don't like splash screens on OS X because apple created 
the dock and the bouncing icon in the dock to tell users that the app is 
launching. I have not done any startup/pageload tests (most of the tests 
are inside the firewall) on mach-o, but startup (for an opt build) appears to 
be much faster. This is partly because I can click the app to start it, and 
then do other things while it bounces away in the dock. While I could do 
other things while it is displaying a splash screen, it is less clear and it 
appears that Mozilla is "dominating" the OS. 

However, some people like this and I can't find a single thing on 
developer.apple.com and in the OS X HIG's that indicate that a splash 
screen is a bad thing. Some people like the splash screen. What are your 
reasons for putting it back in? The first thing I can think of is XP-similarity: 
mach-o should appear to be the same as CFM/win/linux/BeOS/Tru64, but 
is this important enough to spend time on?

Comment 8

[timeless]

yep BeOS and Photon have it, and X11 is getting it.  But just because you 
implement it doesn't mean it has to be the default.  see --splash in the 
help...

Comment 9

[Zach Lipton [:zach]]

I think that this is pretty important and it is something that marketing will 
want if mach-o is released as a commercial product. 

Comment 10

[hacker formerly known as [e-mail]]

There's a patch in bug 111797 which adds splash screen support for mach-o
builds.  There's a bit of controversy over the solution so making this a
dependency bug since the NativeAppSupport changes from bug 111797 will be needed
for this.

Comment 11

[hacker formerly known as [e-mail]]

Attachment: old patch from bug 111797

Comment 12

[hacker formerly known as [e-mail]]

Attachment: Enabled splash by default

This patch just enables the splash screen by default.  We still need the patch
from 181211 to use merged resources that are opened by default so that we don't
have to manually open the resource file for the splash screen.

Comment 13

[Conrad Carlen (not reading bugmail)]

Taking - I've got some fixed up splash screen code.

Comment 14

[Conrad Carlen (not reading bugmail)]

Attachment: new way of doing it

This is an overhaul of the splash screen handling which doesn't even use
Resource Mgr resources. It:

(1) Uses data files in the app bundle (.nib, .jpg)
(2) Resizes the window to fit the image and moves the status text
(3) Calculates whether to draw the status text in black or white depending on
the lightness of the background.
(4) The background of the status text is truly transparent. Background can be
any color, even have texture or detail.

All this means that one can drop a new image data file into the bundle and,
without and resource tweaking for image size or background color, it will look
right.

BTW, the .nib just contains the splash screen, We could name the .nib more
generally and later add alert resources to it and be mostly done with Resource
Mgr resources.

The joys of not having to worry about non-Carbon :-)

Comment 15

[Conrad Carlen (not reading bugmail)]

BTW, this does add about 400 Ms to the Ts test :-( To be fair, can we run Ts on
Mach-O with --nosplash? I tried that, it works, and returns the number to it's
pre-splash screen value. Besides, isn't the pretty picture there to entertain
you for the extra 400 Ms? ;-)

Comment 16

[Conrad Carlen (not reading bugmail)]

Comment on attachment 111660 [details] [diff] [review]
new way of doing it

After thinking about the effect on Ts, I think we should go ahead with this and
use -nosplash on TBoxen running Ts tests.

Comment 17

[Simon Fraser [no longer active]]

Where does that 400ms go? It it in QuickTime image decompression, or what?

Comment 18

[Conrad Carlen (not reading bugmail)]

> Where does that 400ms go? It it in QuickTime image decompression

Not exactly sure. Even if it was, that decompression saves us 30KB, which is
pretty attractive.

Comment 19

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

IMO, using nosplash for tests is cheating - tests should measure the startup
time that a user will see, not the best possible startup time you can get which
won't be achieved in the real world. :-)

Gerv

Comment 20

[Conrad Carlen (not reading bugmail)]

gerv, it's not a matter of opinion. The impact on startup affects mozilla when
it's launched from the command line (as the Ts test does), not when double
clicked in the Finder (as 99.9% of users do) Why? When launching from the
command line, having a splash screen causes the dock icon to start hopping
earlier in the dock, probably with some process manager overhead. When launching
from the Finder, the icon hopping starts immediately with our without the splash
screen. Point is, Ts would show a sizeable increase (400 Ms or so) but, in this
case, Ts doesn't represent reality.

Comment 21

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Fair enough :-) Thanks for clueing me in.

Gerv

Comment 22

[Fredrik Aminoff]

Shouldn't this be fixed now? There are only Mach-O builds and there is a new
splash for 1.3. I realize it might be too late for 1.3 but allmost all Mac-users
have used the default CFM-build 1.2.1 where the splash-screen worked and going
to 1.3 MachO without splash will confuse people, right?

Comment 23

[Greg Fiumara]

Hi, I am the developer for a freeware product called Custom Splash Installer, formally Mozilla Splash Generator. (http://malletandbare.free.fr/).  I can assure you that there is a "market" for a splash screen in Mozilla.  Thousands of people use CSI to customize their Mozilla splash screen and now, with version 1.3, those thousands of people cannot.  Please add the splash screen back in.  Just my 2 cents.

Comment 24

[JonStipe]

Forgive me if this is a stupid question, but is it really a good idea to do a
bunch of calculations to figure out if the status text should be black or white?
I mean, if you're not gonna implement customizable splash screens like Windows
has, then it would just come up the same every time anyway, so you could just
hardcode the color and save startup time. And if you *are* gonna implement
customizable splash screens, wouldn't it make more sense to read the color from
a file or a pref somewhere, so that the screen's artist can set the color, and
maybe things like the position, size, and font?

Of course, it's entirely possible I'm way off base here.

Comment 25

[Josh Aas]

This isn't ever going to get fixed. Reported it myself, and now I think no
splash is a feature, not a bug :)