261732 - scaling issues with multiple tabs open - widget hierachy the cause

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, defect)

Description

[Cameron Simpson]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040914 Firefox/0.10
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040914 Firefox/0.10

There are a few different scaling/redraw issues with the browser when many tabs
are open. They all seem to stem from widget hierachy and/or control issues.

To reproduce, open a large number of tabs. Bonus points for opening _just_ enough 
to require the horizontal tab scroll bar.

The first demo involves opening and closing tabs right at that boundary; as the
scroll bar appears and reappears the whole browser clags up as it does redraw or
relayout for _all_ the tabs, not just the visible one.

The funny thing is that no relayout is needed even for the visible tab because
its width has not changed. It only needs to be blitted down a bit.

You can see the same effect if you do a find-as-you-type with the 1.0 firefox;
it pops up this handy dialogue at the bottom of the page, and triggers the same
redraw stuff.

I think most of the inefficiency could be avoided by a simple hack to short
circuit layout requests for background tabs. A trivial:

    if (this-tab-not-displayed) return;

hack at the top.

However, the relayout/redraw for a change merely of _height_ for the browser
window should also be avoided. A little size tracking would probably suffice.






Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Go to a site with lots of links (big news page, gallery with lots of
thumbnails, etc)
2. Middle-click to open lots of the links in tabs.
3. Perform various resizing type actions. See high power desktop machines
   stall while pointless redraw/relayout occurs.


Actual Results:  
Redraw is done for every tab.
Redraw is done when it could be avoided even for the visible tab.


Expected Results:  
Only the displayed page should need redraw, and often not even that.

Comment 1

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
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If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
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Comment 2

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This bug has been automatically resolved after a period of inactivity (see above
comment). If anyone thinks this is incorrect, they should feel free to reopen it.