1378688 - app splash screen icon makes it feel generally slow

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: Theme and Visual Design, defect)

Description

[Dietrich Ayala (:dietrich)]

The app used to load the UI and then the web page, which gave the impression it was busy loading the web page.

Now it loads the splash screen with the Firefox logo as the app icon, which I see regularly.

Overall, this gives the feeling of a much slower app. Instead of attempting to load the web page, it appears it's now struggling to just load itself.

Adding "regression" since this is a UX regression in the area of perceived performance.

Comment 1

[Jan Henning [:JanH]]

Maybe it might feel better if most of the splash screen (save for example a small circular area immediately surrounding the logo) was transparent, so you could still see the actual UI starting up and pretending to load the page (even if it is in fact still starting up Gecko). But generally I agree - the current splash screen implementation just makes things feel slower.

Comment 2

[William Lachance (:wlach)]

This change also increased the size of the fennec apk by about 350k:

== Change summary for alert #7808 (as of July 11 2017 03:57 UTC) ==

Regressions:

  1%  installer size summary android-4-0-armv7-api15 opt      36,200,098.58 -> 36,544,662.00

For up to date results, see: https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perf.html#/alerts?id=7808

Comment 3

[Nevin Chen(Not active on Bugzilla)]

sorry all splash screen bug all block bug 1379657 directly so I remove blocking bug 1366674.

Comment 4

[Nevin Chen(Not active on Bugzilla)]

Attachment: Bug 1378688 - Make Splash Screen faster by making it's background transparent.

Review commit: https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/156034/diff/#index_header
See other reviews: https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/156034/

Comment 5

[Nevin Chen(Not active on Bugzilla)]

Comment on attachment 8885172 [details]
Bug 1378688 - Make Splash Screen faster by making it's background transparent.

Review request updated; see interdiff: https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/156034/diff/1-2/

Comment 6

[James Willcox (:snorp) ([e-mail]) (he/him)]

I just filed 1380008 for the APK size issue, thanks wlach!

Comment 7

[Max Liu [:maliu]]

Comment on attachment 8885172 [details]
Bug 1378688 - Make Splash Screen faster by making it's background transparent.

https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/156034/#review161514

Comment 8

[Dietrich Ayala (:dietrich)]

I'm concerned that showing any kind of splash icon will reduce perceived performance. We want to give the impression that Firefox is always ready instantly, even if the web page is not.

Does this new approach result in the application UI being fully visible? That will give the feeling that Firefox is always snappy and responsive.

Comment 9

[Dietrich Ayala (:dietrich)]

Actually, if we're showing the application UI fully rendered, then why show the application icon at all? Instead could show a loading animation in the viewport. I think that would result in better perceived performance, and tells a more truthful story about all the various reasons things might be slow in loading/rendering the *web page*, as distinct from the *application*.

Comment 10

[Dietrich Ayala (:dietrich)]

Another interesting optimization could be to show a loading animation and then once the favicon of the website is available, show that in the animation somehow. That tells an even clearer story about what's being slow.

Comment 11

[Wesly Huang (EPM)]

[triage@0712] Nevin is working on it. +

Comment 12

[Nevin Chen(Not active on Bugzilla)]

Hi Dietrich!
Thanks for your feedback!

I've submit a new version.
Please help check in Nightly after it lands:)

Comment 14

[Nevin Chen(Not active on Bugzilla)]

Attachment: Bug 1378688 - Scale the image to save APK size, respect channel, and hide splash screen when the user interact with url bar.

Review commit: https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/156474/diff/#index_header
See other reviews: https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/156474/

Comment 17

[James Willcox (:snorp) ([e-mail]) (he/him)]

We need to be careful about loading animations. In the past we've seen that those can be very costly in terms of battery life, and in some cases they can slow down the actual page load. I'll see if I can dig up some bugs from years back.

Comment 18

[James Willcox (:snorp) ([e-mail]) (he/him)]

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=917896#c1 and related bugs for reference

Comment 19

[Max Liu [:maliu]]

Comment on attachment 8885652 [details]
Bug 1378688 - Scale the image to save APK size, respect channel, and hide splash screen when the user interact with url bar.

https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/156474/#review161894

::: mobile/android/base/java/org/mozilla/gecko/widget/SplashScreen.java:7
(Diff revision 1)
> +import android.util.Log;
> +import android.view.View;

Not secessary import?

Comment 20

[Nevin Chen(Not active on Bugzilla)]

Comment on attachment 8885652 [details]
Bug 1378688 - Scale the image to save APK size, respect channel, and hide splash screen when the user interact with url bar.

Review request updated; see interdiff: https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/156474/diff/1-2/

Comment 21

[Nevin Chen(Not active on Bugzilla)]

Comment on attachment 8885172 [details]
Bug 1378688 - Make Splash Screen faster by making it's background transparent.

Review request updated; see interdiff: https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/156034/diff/2-3/

Comment 22

[Nevin Chen(Not active on Bugzilla)]

Comment on attachment 8885652 [details]
Bug 1378688 - Scale the image to save APK size, respect channel, and hide splash screen when the user interact with url bar.

Review request updated; see interdiff: https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/156474/diff/2-3/

Comment 23

[Nevin Chen(Not active on Bugzilla)]

Comment on attachment 8885652 [details]
Bug 1378688 - Scale the image to save APK size, respect channel, and hide splash screen when the user interact with url bar.

Review request updated; see interdiff: https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/156474/diff/3-4/

Comment 24

[Nevin Chen(Not active on Bugzilla)]

Comment on attachment 8885652 [details]
Bug 1378688 - Scale the image to save APK size, respect channel, and hide splash screen when the user interact with url bar.

Review request updated; see interdiff: https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/156474/diff/4-5/

Comment 25

[Nevin Chen(Not active on Bugzilla)]

Hi snorp
I totaly agree with you about the CPU usage. And even memory consumtion( We scale the logo image to reduce the APK size). This will increase ~8MB memory footprint when startup. But at this time I think the hardware spec is much better now. I'll still want to see how the users repsonse to our design for "perceived performance".

Comment 26

[Nevin Chen(Not active on Bugzilla)]

Comment on attachment 8885652 [details]
Bug 1378688 - Scale the image to save APK size, respect channel, and hide splash screen when the user interact with url bar.

Review request updated; see interdiff: https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/156474/diff/5-6/

Comment 27

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/29ab214f96d2
Make Splash Screen faster by making it's background transparent. r=maliu
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/7b5d4791c970
Scale the image to save APK size, respect channel, and hide splash screen when the user interact with url bar. r=maliu

Comment 28

[Dietrich Ayala (:dietrich)]

(In reply to Nevin Chen [:nechen] from comment #25)
> I'll still want to see how the users repsonse to our design for
> "perceived performance".

Hey Nevin, do you have any background on why we added the splash screen to begin with?

I'm pretty skeptical that showing a Firefox logo will improve perceived performance in any way.

I think it does the opposite. It tells a clear story about how *Firefox* is slow, instead of how the *network or website* is slow.

Comment 29

[Dietrich Ayala (:dietrich)]

I'm curious, maybe Snorp you know this: Do we have telemetry around how often we get launched from app icon vs link click?

I filed this bug because my use of the browser feels almost entirely from app-to-app, not homescreen launches, which made the splash screen feel especially intrusive in the workflow.

I can understand the Firefox logo splash on launch from homescreen. But when loading from other app, seems like we want to do everything possible to instantly launch app UI and push any perceived slowness away onto other potential causes.

Comment 30

[Paul [pwd]]

AFAIK the splash screen is just a resource and thus is displayed while the system is trying to load the UI. However Fennec takes longer than your average Android app to load the UI due to using custom UI elements. I'm not sure if that'll be negated after Photon.

Comment 31

[Jan Henning [:JanH]]

(In reply to Paul [pwd] from comment #30)
> AFAIK the splash screen is just a resource and thus is displayed while the
> system is trying to load the UI. However Fennec takes longer than your
> average Android app to load the UI due to using custom UI elements.

While Gecko does unfortunately indeed need a few seconds to get up and running, the rest of our UI actually appears fairly quickly. There's only a short flash of white (which by the way is still there even with the splash screen) before we show the address bar (complete with the progress bar pretending we're already loading the page, even if in fact we're still busy starting up Gecko first), and once that happens you can already interact with the app in some ways, e.g. open/close tabs, look at the awesome screen, paste a link to open it, etc.
Hence the splash screen (especially the current variety on Nightly with the all white background) makes things feel slower, because now it seems like even our UI is taking several seconds to start up.

Comment 32

[James Willcox (:snorp) ([e-mail]) (he/him)]

(In reply to Dietrich Ayala (:dietrich) from comment #29)
> I'm curious, maybe Snorp you know this: Do we have telemetry around how
> often we get launched from app icon vs link click?

We do record telemetry on this[1], but I don't really know how to find the results.

https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/mobile/android/base/java/org/mozilla/gecko/BrowserApp.java#4293

Comment 33

[Carsten Book [:Tomcat]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/29ab214f96d2
https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/7b5d4791c970

Comment 34

[Dietrich Ayala (:dietrich)]

Filed a follow-up to re-examine the logo issue; bug 1380698

Comment 35

[Oana Horvath [:ohorvath]]

Verified that the URL bar and loading indicator are now visible on Nightly 57 and Beta 56 and the screen closes if you interact with the URL bar.