Open Bug 1707263 Opened 4 years ago Updated 1 year ago

Try to only show the skeleton UI for startups longer than 5 or so seconds

Categories

(Firefox :: General, enhancement)

Firefox 89
enhancement

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()

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(Reporter: rick3162, Unassigned)

Details

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(4 files)

Attached image screenshot.jpg

The issue I'm having is that with FF dev/beta 89,
every single time at startup I consistently see momentarily the Skeleton UI (see attached screenshot)

I find that strange because that profile is fresh, with absolutely no extensions or changes by me, and the disk is a really fast SSD (RAM 16 GB , CPU i7 9700K ).

On the other hand, with Nightly 90 (also with a fresh profile with with absolutely no changes by me),
I never get to see the skeleton UI at startup.

A workaround would be to set the relevant pref 'browser.startup.preXulSkeletonUI' to false,
BUT, as I mentioned, in Nightly, where the pref is also set to true, the issue NEVER occurs.

 
I have tried refreshing the profile or removing the profile and creating a new,
and even completely uninstalling FF dev (+ removing the Root and Local directories of the profile) and reinstalling it, but didn't help.

The issue also occurs in Safe mode, right before the 'Open'/'Refresh Firefox dev' appears.

I attach two video captures:

  • the first, where the issue occurs in Safe Mode (at the point between sec 1-2. see https://i.imgur.com/c7SUaxv.jpg )
  • the second has Nightly vs Dev, both fresh profiles, to see the difference (in the former it never occurs).

 
Using:

  • Firefox developer edition 89.0b3 x64
  • Nightly 90.0a1 (2021-04-23)
  • Windows 10 x64 20H2
Attached video Nightly Vs Dev.wmv

Hi Kostas,
Thanks so much for reporting this issue. I was able to reproduce this bug on Windows 10 on Firefox developer edition 89.0b3 (64-bit) but it happened in a slightly different way: not the skeleton UI appeared, but it took a bit to load all the UI. Issue could not be reproducible on Nightly 90.0a1 (2021-04-26) (64-bit) nor Beta 89.0b4 (64-bit), which means that this bug has already been resolved and it will be fixed on future Firefox Release versions.

Firefox Nightly is made by codes and fixes made by Mozilla developers, that are compiled into a common code repository (Mozilla-central) to create a pre-release version of Firefox for testing purposes. After the code on Nightly matures, it is merged into stabilization repositories (Beta, ESR and Dev Edition) where that code will be polished until reaching the final version of Firefox (Release).

When Release reaches Beta's actual version, you'll be able to see the fix. As per the Firefox Release Calendar, Release 89 is expected to ship on 2021-06-01. You can find more info here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Release_Management/Calendar

I’ll mark this ticket as resolved since once the natural cycle is complete you won't have this bug; but feel free to reopen it if you experience this behaviour in the future once the migration to Release has been made.
Regards,

Jerónimo

Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED
Closed: 4 years ago
Resolution: --- → FIXED
Attached file Beta + Dev 89.0b4.zip

Thanks for your reply.

In Nightly it never occurred and cannot reproduce it.

But, in Firefox Dev 89.0b4 (64-bit) as well as in Beta 89.0b4 (64-bit) -both fresh profiles- I can still reproduce it consistently.
I attach two video captures (zip).

I can also reproduce it consistently with the new Firefox Dev 89.0b5 (64-bit) .
I'm reopening this.

Status: RESOLVED → UNCONFIRMED
Resolution: FIXED → ---

It continues to occur with all the new betas, incl. latest 89.0b9 (64-bit) .

Doug, can you please help clarify if the bug that fixed this issue needs beta uplift ?

Flags: needinfo?(dothayer)

(In reply to Kostas from comment #6)

It continues to occur with all the new betas, incl. latest 89.0b9 (64-bit) .

I see it with 89.0b14 (64-bit).

Kostas, can you clarify the precise problem here? Is it that you're seeing it at all? Or that you're seeing it flash briefly when starting in safe mode? The latter seems like a bug, but I don't see why the former is. I'm confused how the video from comment 2 is with a fresh profile on Nightly, because it appears you have a non-default theme. That's probably why you're not seeing the skeleton UI there, because it doesn't show up for non-default themes. If you're bothered by seeing the skeleton UI pop up on Beta, could you clarify why? If the skeleton UI pops up for 1 second, then that means what you would normally see is just 1 second of nothing whatsoever, since the skeleton UI shows long before we're able to open a normal window.

Flags: needinfo?(dothayer) → needinfo?(rick3162)

Kostas, can you clarify the precise problem here? Is it that you're seeing it at all?
(...)
If you're bothered by seeing the skeleton UI pop up on Beta, could you clarify why? If the skeleton UI pops up for 1 second, then that means what you would normally see is just 1 second of nothing whatsoever, since the skeleton UI shows long before we're able to open a normal window.

Yes, of course. The problem for me is that I see it at all: I expected that the Skeleton UI would never popup for me, since I have very fast system
(m2 SSD, i7 9700K, 16GB RAM ). I thought it only applies to slow systems.
Yes, it appears briefly, just for 1 sec, but the fact that it occurs gives me the wrong impression that the launch was slow for some reason.
To my thinking, its existence implies delay, and so it has no place in fast systems .

 

I'm confused how the video from comment 2 is with a fresh profile on Nightly, because it appears you have a non-default theme. That's probably why you're not seeing the skeleton UI there, because it doesn't show up for non-default themes.

Sorry about comment #2: yes, with Nightly it wasn't a fresh profile, but it was almost intact (so I thought it doesn't matter) , it was the profile I had from day 1 I installed Nightly: I had only changed the theme to 'Alpenglow', and had added just a few bookmarks, no modified settings or prefs whatsoever. I just tried it with a fresh profile, and I see that with the default theme the skeleton UI appears too.

 
To summarize, in my humble opinion:

  • the skeleton UI should appear only on slow systems, never on fast ones, not even briefly.
  • (on slow systems) it should also appear on non-default themes, to avoid confusion.
Flags: needinfo?(rick3162)
Summary: Skeleton UI in a fast system with FF 89 beta (but not Nightly 90) → Skeleton UI in a fast system with FF 89 beta (as well with Nightly 90)

To clarify, what I meant is that the Skeleton UI shouldn't appear on fast startups. i.e. when the startup is less than 2-3 seconds.
Yes, a slow startup can occur in a fast system as well (for various reasons: the profile might have issues, too many/problematic extensions, etc, )
so, I rephrase my suggestion:

  • the skeleton UI should appear only on slow startups, never on fast ones (within 2-3 sec), not even briefly.
  • (on slow startups) it should also appear with non-default themes, for consistency.

Hmm. This is certainly helpful data, and thank you for providing it. We have to weigh it against internal reports that even on fast systems the skeleton UI feels good, because it is a nearly instantaneous response to user input. However we did run an experiment on Release to measure retention with the skeleton UI, and there was a slight (though not statistically significant) lean in the data suggesting that on fast startups the skeleton UI may have made a negative impression on users.

From a technical perspective, it's also tricky, however. Regarding the suggestion that we never show the skeleton on fast startups, we can't necessarily know this in advance. We could show it after a cutoff of 3 seconds, but we have to show it from the main thread, so we would have to add code in a bunch of places to check in and see "has it been 3 seconds yet?" We could do that, but sometimes one system takes, say, 5 seconds to run its startup code, so that could land us showing the skeleton UI after as much as 8 seconds.

I think something like this probably is what we want to do, but I don't yet know precisely what it should look like. We may want to take advantage of the fact that we run a launcher process before we actually run the main Firefox process, and that launcher process takes some amount of time. We could estimate that if the launcher process took more than half a second to run, it's likely that a full startup is going to take more than 5 seconds, so we should show the skeleton UI. However, nothing we do here is going to be perfect - just best effort.

Regarding non-default themes, it's something we want to do. We just want there to not be a jarring mismatch between the colors. If a user has a predominantly dark custom theme, we don't want to flash a light skeleton UI, for example. I think we can actually adjust the colors of the skeleton UI and approximate a match, it's just code that we haven't had the time to write, test, and debug yet.

I'm changing the title and type of this bug to better match what I think we should do here. Let me know if you disagree with the change.

Type: defect → enhancement
Summary: Skeleton UI in a fast system with FF 89 beta (as well with Nightly 90) → Try to only show the skeleton UI for startups longer than 5 or so seconds

Thank you for taking my suggestions into consideration.
And, I agree with the title and type changes.

Opening this as an enhancement.

Severity: -- → S4
Status: UNCONFIRMED → NEW
Ever confirmed: true
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