336311 - Major Screen Flicker when loading HTML with several applets

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Devaun Ferguson]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.2) Gecko/20060308 Firefox/1.5.0.2
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.2) Gecko/20060308 Firefox/1.5.0.2

Issue:
Major flicker when loading a page with several applets in Firefox/1.5.0.2.  Netscape flickers as well.  IE6 does not flicker at all when loading the applets.

Concern:
Our product is a reporting product with many embeded applets (which are graphs) in one HTML document.  It is not uncommon to have 50-70 graphs on a single HTML report.   The Firefox screen flicker  on document load is very annoying.  If there are a lot of applets(say more than 10) on a given page, the firefox screen flickers so much the user's think the browser is crashing.  This makes the product unappealing to view on FireFox.  It appears the screen is bouncing once for each applet.  The more applets, the more screen flicker/bounces it seems.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
Test Case:  (Attached in a zip are a html, applet.class)
Copy the html/applet to a directory and launch the test.html.  The html contains 50 applet object/embed statements, each with 500 short parameters.  The applet on init reads the parameters and displays a count.  Nothing really CPU intensive.  Also, I have enclosed the java for the applet in case you wish to look under the covers.  It is a very basic,simple applet.  The HTML is straight forward and simple.


Scenario #1: Firefox Flickers, once per applet in the html document. (To many screen flashes to really count...)
1) open the test.html with firefox (ensure the .class and .html are in same directory)
2) You will notice several seconds of major screen flashing/flickering.


Scenario #2: IE exibits desired behavior:
1) open the test.html in IE.  
2) Notice zero flicker as the applets load.


Actual Results:  
Screen Flickers massivly in Firefox.

Expected Results:  
Like IE, no screen flicker.

This flicker is so intrusive, we have troubles recommending to use Firefox with our customers.  Firefox loads the large reports so very much faster than IE.  But, the Flicker is so apparent that we feel our customers will be put off.

Comment 1

[Devaun Ferguson]

Attachment: html, applet. Please unzip into one directory, open the html.

Unzip into one directory.  Open the HTML with Firefox, the applet should load.  Notice the screen flicker.

Also, in the zip are the java src that makes the applet if you need to investigate for some reason.

Comment 2

[tierrax]

Screen and address bar start to flicker when opening some sites from links included in thunderbird. After opening some links in background it flickers in one tab. 
Right now I opened a tab in background andcurrent one started flickering.

Bug continues after rebooting.

Comment 3

[Steve England [:stevee]]

Reporter, do you still see this problem with the latest Firefox 2? If not, can you please close this bug as WORKSFORME. Thanks!

Comment 4

[Mats Palmgren (inactive)]

Devaun, does the problem also occur in Firefox 3?
http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/

Comment 5

[Devaun Ferguson]

Hi,
Downloaded zip, tried again in Firefox3.0.5 (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.5) Gecko/2008120122 Firefox/3.0.5)

Opened Firefox3, open, load page.  No flicker, acts better then IE(of course!)  But, hit refresh and browser crashes.  Repeated experiment, crashed again.  Here is the details:
******
Add-ons: {3112ca9c-de6d-4884-a869-9855de68056c}:5.0.20080919Wb1,{CAFEEFAC-0015-0000-0016-ABCDEFFEDCBA}:5.0.16,{c45c406e-ab73-11d8-be73-000a95be3b12}:1.1.6,{972ce4c6-7e08-4474-a285-3208198ce6fd}:3.0.5
BuildID: 2008120122
CrashTime: 1233071204
InstallTime: 1229613675
ProductName: Firefox
SecondsSinceLastCrash: 223
StartupTime: 1233071173
Theme: classic/1.0
URL: file:///C:/1962/test.html
UserID: 28e32dd6-2700-4fc3-b593-bc1fc6a6458f
Vendor: Mozilla
Version: 3.0.5

This report also contains technical information about the state of the application when it crashed.
*******
SO faster, but refreshes on the page crash the browser hard.
Thanks!
Devaun.

Comment 6

[Mats Palmgren (inactive)]

Thanks for your feedback.  I think the crash is a separate problem,
I have filed bug 479558 on it.  Since the flicker is gone (original problem)
I'm resolving this bug as WORKSFORME.