1540832 - Consider using idle task for preloaded new tab browsers created when opening new tabs

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, defect, P3)

Description

[:Gijs (away/busy until Mar 10)]

(In reply to Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️) from bug 1537694 comment #21)

So, looking at how bug 1353013 is implemented, I have a few thoughts:

1. It looks to me like we're still preloading after every tab open[1], which I found a little surprising - I assumed that we were going to make every preload occur when idle, and not just the initial one.

I didn't really deal with this in bug 1353013, because I was mostly focused on the window open case, and ensuring we have a tab preloaded for non-popup windows. My thinking was that the user is likely to create one at some point (or at least, at least as likely to do so as they are after creating the first new tab), and that we just didn't want to do so synchronously as soon as the window opened.

It seems fine to me to switch the "we've opened a new tab page, let's preload another one" to a lazy task. Though it'd also make me wonder if we could delay it even further, like until after the new tab isn't empty any more (ie after a navigation is triggered in that tab)...