1849340 - about:processes Confusing UI and doc shortcomings

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Toolkit :: Performance Monitoring, enhancement)

Description

[Graham Wideman]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/116.0

Steps to reproduce:

With the removal of about:performance, I was force to use about:processes. Its UI is unintuitive, and its docs aren't helpful.

Actual results:

about:processes presents a list of rows, some with boldface domain names and others having lightfaced type, interspersed. The domain name rows don't show full URLs (they are not even full domain names), so if there are many from the same domain you can't tell them apart. many of the lightfaced rows show page titles, which might or might not pertain to the preceding boldface URL rows, can't tell, because the lightface rows omit paths as well, and there's no visual indication of the association. Some boldface lines are followed by more than one lightface row. There are some boldface rows that apparently are unrelated to pages at all (like "Firefox").
There's a gear icon at the right of the header, where a menu might be expected, whose hint says "Actions", but does nothing when clicked.

Expected results:

1. The UI should make sense as to how it facilitates common user operations, such as finding pages consuming high CPU or Memory, so that we can quickly kill those off. This was clear and easy in about:performance. The about:processes UI fails, because it apparently shows a list of processes, and it's far from straightforward how those relate to pages.
2. The list of processes shows a seemingly random assortment of second-level domain names (in bold), Tabs, subframes, and I guess internal objects like GPU or Utility. It might be the case that some processes are subsidiary to others, like maybe the lightface ones are subsidiary to the boldface ones, but it's not at all clear that's the case, or what the significance of bold vs light is. The doc page doesn't mention this.
   At the very least, if there is some relationship between rows, that should be made clear with indentation, or other conventional tree graphics.
3. The premise of about:processess page is that users of it are conversant with processes. How likely is that? There's no clearer indication that this UI is unfit for ordinary human consumption than the fact that in the doc page (which is misnamed "Task Manager - see whether tabs or extensions are slowing down Firefox") the ONLY explanation of what a Process means is a reference to the developer docs.
   Summary:
   Probably about:processes is useful as a rough-and-ready page about processes for developers who are perhaps familiar with processes, and the relationship between processes and other processes, and processes with pages. But it is not a suitable fallback from about:performance, for end-users doing the end-user tasks of killing CPU or memory hogging pages, because end users are not developers. Maybe the page, and its docs, could be refined sufficiently to get it there, but at the moment it's a confusing mess.

Comment 1

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Toolkit::Performance Monitoring' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please correct in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 2

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The severity field is not set for this bug.
:dthayer, could you have a look please?

For more information, please visit BugBot documentation.

Comment 3

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

Hey florian,

Just putting this on your radar. Is this something you're still hacking on? Perhaps there are some alternative visualizations we should consider for about:processes.

Comment 4

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

(In reply to Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️) from comment #3)

Is this something you're still hacking on?

Not actively, but I would probably still fix bugs.