1656383 - Consolidated about:processes (Task Manager) to support Fission

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(User Experience Design Graveyard :: Firefox Desktop: Consultation, task, P3)

Description

[Mike Conca [:mconca]]

Request Description
The Fission project would like some UX support to help design a new Task Manager for Firefox that supports Fission. See PRD for more info.

Deadline
October 1st.

Priority Level
2 = Medium

Priority Level Description
This feature, while eventually customer facing, is particularly useful for Mozilla developers working on Fission. As Fission gets closer to Nightly, it becomes a more and more important tool for debugging.

Supporting Information
Link to PRD

Comment 1

[Markus Jaritz [:markus] (UX)]

Closing this as we will not get to spend more time unless it is prioritized highly against one of our core focus areas (push, pull, revenue).
If you thin I made a mistake please reach out and let's align with the relevant PM.

So far we did a review of the current implementation. Some improvements and problems documented here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TxnYL3fTI18RVqjoLZjB_VtM87L8aU-H48KUedwGhns/edit#gid=0

Overall it is still a challenge to expect users to understand a process manager that is not tied to how they separate things (per tab) and have them understand what will be ended when ending a certain process.

Comment 2

[Neha Kochar [:neha]]

Reopening this, as we'd like to get this done at some point.
The ultimate goal is to merge about:processes and about:performance with all necessary info and possible actions and have the Task Manager from the hamburger menu point to this merged version.

Some context from our meeting in December 2020 with Florian:

• about:performance focuses on tabs and add-ons (i.e. things the user can act on). about:processes focuses on processes. With Fission enabled, processes might be a good enough approximation (and killing a process is actionable for users).
• There are a few things that about:performance does better than about:processes that could be ported with relatively little effort (eg. colored backgrounds to see graphically the relative CPU use, being able to select a row to follow it even if it moves due to refreshing the view).
• about:performance was written before browsingContextGroups existed so is incorrect in some ways.
• Event loop instrumentation used in about:performance is based on docGroups and we haven’t been labeling so this is incorrect.
• about:performance is the last user of docGroup labeling which we would like to remove.
• Memory calculation looks at static stuff such as JS collected heap, but that’s shared with other tabs that are in the same BC group.
• CPU utilization in about:performance is not accurate - does not account for all runnables, does not correctly show CPU heavy use for webRTC use.
• To merge them both into one, we would need to add CPU time for each individual tab in about:processes. But how do we do this without docGroup labeling? Maybe using autoEntry script? This will be more accurate but will still miss layout stuff.

Known work to do for about:processes :

• Add CPU time
• Add memory for each tab line and only display shared memory for the process line
• Resizing columns
• Resizing window should not cut out fields/columns

Florian, we may be able to get UX consultation but the implementation will be on us. There are some notes from Markus in comment 1. Is this something that you will have bandwidth for sometime in H1?

Comment 3

[James Teh [:Jamie]]

about:processes also needs to be accessible to people with disabilities before it can replace about:performance as Task Manager. See bug 1652591.

Comment 4

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

With bug 1777563 fixed, I think we can now close this bug.