1885344 - URLs appear too late in the URL bar when loading inactive web pages

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: Address Bar, enhancement, P3)

Description

[rapava04]

Steps to reproduce:

1. open a bunch of web pages
2. $ killall firefox
3. reopen firefox and choose "restore previous session"
4. use ctrl+tab to switch to inactive pages

Actual results:

webpages start to load before the URL appears in the URL bar. There is a significant delay between switching to another tab and URL being rendered in the URL bar.

This is an issue, because some users keep a lot of tabs opened, and sometimes prefer to go through those tabs & close unnecessary ones. When choosing whether they want a tab closed, it's often enough to take a look at the url without waiting for the tab to load, so the delay slows down the process, makes the browser feel less snappy and adds an element of unnecessary annoyance to user experience.

Expected results:

URLs should appear instantly in the URL bar after switching tabs.

Comment 1

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

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

Comment 2

[Monica Chiorean]

I can not reproduce the issue on Win11x64 using Firefox build 124.0, tabs seems to load under 1-2sec.
Rapava04, can you please mention what Firefox build and OS are you using, also how much does it take for the tabs to load? It there a specific site that takes longer? Thank you.

Comment 3

[rapava04]

Fedora Linux Mozilla Firefox 122.0

My problem is not the fact that pages take too much time to load, but the fact that URL doesn't appear instantly after switching tabs. The page starts to load earlier than the url appears, and it seems to me like there is no real reason to delay rendering of the URL in the address bar.

P.S. I doubt hardware is the issue as it's 11th gen i7 and a nvidia 20 series gpu

Comment 4

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

In general there ARE real security reasons to delay showing a URL in the address bar, as pages may use tricks to stay in a perpetual loading state while setting the address bar to something else, thus potentially opening to phishing attacks. That's why normally the address bar url is set to the final value only once the load is confirmed.

There are cases where we're pretty sure the previous page is controlled by Firefox, and then we can safely anticipate the URL. We must evaluate if this would be one of those cases.

Comment 5

[James Teow [:jteow]]

This needs investigation on whether or not from the security perspective this would safe to implement.

If we can guarantee that the URL is set by session restore, this might be okay.

Comment 12

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

Restricting comments due to spam.