1812019 - Stop the tab loading animation after a while for pages that never finish loading

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, enhancement)

Description

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

I'm opening this separate bug to track the front-end part of what was discussed in bug 1503259 (that we can then keep for the platform work).

Some pages never finish loading, and the tab loading animation is power hungry. I think it would make sense to stop the animation after some amount of time (I suggested doing it after a minute or two in bug 1503259 comment 26).

Gijs told me we already have a no-animation icon used for the prefers-reduced-motion case.

He suggested that we could check the 99 percentile for page load duration and could switch to the existing static icon (or a frozen version of the loading spinner) at that point.

We would need to verify if UX agrees.

Comment 1

[Josh Berman]

Hey there, UX here. We're in the process of updating our iconography. We dont currently have an updated icon for the hourglass that is being used for prefers-reduced-motion so we’ll get that done and then we can update it for prefers-reduced-motion and have this animation time out and revert to prefers-reduced-motion iconography. Did we check the 99 percentile for page load duration? Curious what that is.

Comment 2

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

(In reply to Josh Berman from comment #1)

Hey there, UX here. We're in the process of updating our iconography. We dont currently have an updated icon for the hourglass that is being used for prefers-reduced-motion so we’ll get that done and then we can update it for prefers-reduced-motion and have this animation time out and revert to prefers-reduced-motion iconography.

Thanks!

Did we check the 99 percentile for page load duration? Curious what that is.

So far I have https://telemetry.mozilla.org/new-pipeline/dist.html#!cumulative=0&end_date=2023-01-22&include_spill=0&keys=__none__!__none__!__none__&max_channel_version=beta%252F110&measure=FX_PAGE_LOAD_MS_2&min_channel_version=beta%252F107&processType=*&product=Firefox&sanitize=1&sort_by_value=0&sort_keys=submissions&start_date=2023-01-16&table=0&trim=1&use_submission_date=0 telling me that the 95 percentile on beta is 10s.
I'm asking around to see if we have any probe that could give us the 99 percentile on the release channel.

Comment 3

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

(In reply to Josh Berman from comment #1)

Did we check the 99 percentile for page load duration? Curious what that is.

Someone in the perf team pointed me to the perf_page_load_time_ms probe. On the release channel the
99th percentile seems to be around 45s.

Comment 4

[Josh Berman]

Thanks Florian. A little update - the icon design is in progress. Not sure when it will be finalized but they're just working through final feedback. Will provide updated assets when they come through. I am thinking on whether the animated loading indicator swaps out for icon at 95 percentile or 99 percentile. Curious to hear your thoughts.

Comment 5

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

(In reply to Josh Berman from comment #4)

Thanks for the update!

I am thinking on whether the animated loading indicator swaps out for icon at 95 percentile or 99 percentile. Curious to hear your thoughts.

I think it really depends if you would like this change to convey a message to the user (this page is slow to load / this page load may never finish) or if we are purely looking at trying to save battery. If the latter, we could make the time even longer than the 99 percentile (1 or 2 minutes would be totally fine).

Comment 6

[Josh Berman]

Thanks Florian. Another question. Does the page loading ever time out? Or would it just keep on going?

Comment 7

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

(In reply to Josh Berman from comment #6)

Does the page loading ever time out? Or would it just keep on going?

If there's a single network request, it will timeout at some point. But we are seeing cases where the animation currently continues forever. Either because the site keeps trying to load more things, or because of browser bugs.

Comment 8

[Josh Berman]

Attachment: hourglass-16.svg

Here is the hourglass icon. For documentation, I want to mention that it was raised in the UX team it might be helpful to include contextual text that would explicitly state the page is loading so that users do not confuse the hourglass with a site favicon. As we wont be implementing this until at least 45 seconds (99th percentile), I'm not convinced it is necessary. I want to think about it a little bit more.

Comment 9

[Josh Berman]

I think lets go with 99 percentile and just change the loading animation for the icon. I do not think we need to add contextual text at this time. Let me know if you need anything else from me. Thank you.

Comment 10

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

http://tests.themasta.com/load-never-finishes.php can be used as a test case when implementing a fix for this bug.

(In reply to Josh Berman from comment #9)

I think lets go with 99 percentile and just change the loading animation for the icon. I do not think we need to add contextual text at this time. Let me know if you need anything else from me. Thank you.

Thanks! I don't need anything more, but maybe the engineer who will work on actually fixing the bug will have questions for you.