1129087 - Gmail redirects are very slow

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox for iOS :: Browser, defect)

Description

[Brian Nicholson (:bnicholson)]

STR: Go to gmail.com and sign in. It takes multiple redirects, where each redirect takes at least a second or two, taking longer than expected to load. Safari doesn't have this problem.

Comment 1

[Stefan Arentz | :st3fan | ⏰ EST | he/him]

My guess is that this is happening because GMail is trying some fallback scenarios for APIs that it needs. The WebView does not support all the APIs that Safari has and I think that is why it redirects through two or three different versions of the mobile GMail code.

One thing that may be missing or not fully implemented in the WebView is window.applicationCache for example. (This is a hunch, because I see window.applicationCache is set to UNCACHED)

Comment 2

[Stefan Arentz | :st3fan | ⏰ EST | he/him]

Also, if it was not clear, I think these issues are very GMail application specific and not related to redirects at all. Setting window.location from the console results in an instant redirect.

Comment 3

[Stefan Arentz | :st3fan | ⏰ EST | he/him]

I also ruled out things in our app that possibly slow down redirects. I ran the app with the following disabled:

 * Reader Mode / User Scripts
 * Navigation Delegate
 * UI Delegate
 * KVO

Which made no difference.

To completely rule out our code I wrote a minimal iOS app with just a WKWebView: the slow redirects also happen there.

Comment 4

[Stefan Arentz | :st3fan | ⏰ EST | he/him]

UIWebView is much faster.

This is the redirect path taken from webView:shouldStartLoadWithRequest:navigationType:

https://gmail.com/
https://mail.google.com/mail/
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/x/8qe2vyjb3zls-/?f=1
https://mail.google.com/mail/mu/
https://mail.google.com/mail/mu/mp/995/
about:blank
https://mail.google.com/mail/mu/mp/995/#tl/Inbox
about:blank

(About blank is probably because some frame magic that GMail does)

Comment 5

[Stefan Arentz | :st3fan | ⏰ EST | he/him]

This needs to be tested on iOS9 to find out if this is a WebView issue or a gmail issue.

Comment 6

[Wesley Johnston (:wesj)]

I think there's nothing we can do here. Might be fixed in iOS9?