17322 - Preference of which is preferred - fast layout/stable layout

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: Layout, defect, P3)

Description

[Matthew Tuck [:CodeMachine]]

It would be nice if a user could distinguish between preferring fast layout
(render data as soon as available) or stable layout (don't render anything until
you're sure it will stay that way).

Things that can lead to a rendering change include:

o incremental flowing of tables, etc.  (see bug #854)
o images not yet loaded  (see bug #1994)
o primary stylesheet not yet loaded  (see bug #17309)

Comment 1

[Matthew Tuck [:CodeMachine]]

This could be backed up with a timeout, see in particular bug #17309.

Comment 2

[troy]

We need to improve the load time. What you see today is just step one in the
process. There's a lot of tuning we need to do

Comment 3

[Matthew Tuck [:CodeMachine]]

Actually, I created this with no regard to the current state of Mozilla.  I
haven't even seen the effects of bug #854 yet.  No matter how much you optimise
Mozilla, you're still going to have network effects, and this will still be an
issue.

Comment 4

[Robert O'Callahan (:roc) (email my personal email if necessary)]

How about a preferences setting for "Re-render page at most every [N] seconds"?
I.e. after each layout/redraw, wait for at least N seconds (or until all streams
have finished loading) before doing it again in response to a network event. The
wait would also be incurred at the beginning of the load.

Comment 5

[Robert O'Callahan (:roc) (email my personal email if necessary)]

Eeep, that idea is already covered in depth ... see bug #17325. Sorry.

Comment 6

[troy]

I really want to avoid adding preferences for this kind of thing if it can at
all be helped.

We've done this in the past and it has made the browser UI way too complicated
and we've ended up eliminating many of the preferences

Comment 7

[Jerry Baker]

No such thing as too many preferences. The lack of prefs in the 4.X series GUI
made me spend a couple weekends writing an app to mimic the Netscape prefs
dialog, but include all known working prefs. Hopefully with Mozilla we will get
prefs documentation that actually is correct.

Comment 8

[Chris Petersen]

Based on troy's comments, marking as verified wont fix.

Comment 9

[Ian Tommins ('thelem')]

To Fix the preferances problem, allow a 'show full preferaces' flag to be set in
the preferances box, much like ICQ's Simple and Advanced mode. Then just add all
additional preferances into advanced mode, the default mode being simple

Comment 10

[David Krause]

*** Bug 34018 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 11

[Matthew Tuck [:CodeMachine]]

Reopening.  Too many people want this.  If you don't want to clutter the UI,
make it a back-end only pref.  There are plenty of these around.

We can later put it into the UI under bug #17199 or some such similar thing.

Comment 12

[Denis]

What about displaying *something* in stable layout mode, if data is available 
(text)
Then ask the user whether to update it when you're sure that the layout will 
stay that way

Maybe the dialog would open only if it has been a significant amount of time 
since first rendering (so the user could read the text) 

Comment 13

[karnaze (gone)]

Reassigning to kmcclusk.

Comment 14

[Kevin McCluskey (gone)]

This can already be controlled for the most part using the
content.notify.interval pref:

If you set this value to:
user_pref("content.notify.interval", 2000000);
Then layout/display will not happen until most/all of the page has been loaded.

If you leave it at its default or make it smaller:
user_pref("content.notify.interval", 125000);
then layout/display will occur almost immediately when content arrives.

The default which I just checked in a change for is:
user_pref("content.notify.interval", 250000);



Granted, this is not as precise as the solutions that have been suggested in
this bug but it does accomplish the goal of letting the user "distinguish
between preferring fast layout (render data as soon as available) or stable layout."

Comment 15

[Kevin McCluskey (gone)]

Marking WONTFIX