358336 - tabbar makes browsing less responsive / delays rendering

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, enhancement)

Description

[holgbert]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061010 Firefox/2.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061010 Firefox/2.0

Firefox feels faster without the tabbar.
The time from clicking a link or entering a URL to initial display of the page is increased by about 1/10 s when the tabbar is present.

This doesn't sound like alot but it really changes the browsing experience expecially when quickly navigating a site.
A friend and me were quite disappointed to see opera easily outperform FF  but we finally nailed it down to the tabbar being hid/visible.

I guess the tabbar shouldn't take that mouch processing power and something seems to be messed up.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Open a fresh FF window
2.navigate around a site with good load times  ( maybe even locally stored )
3.add a Tab ( or more. doesn't matter)  and compare navigation speed.
4.quantify your annoyance with the Faster Fox Add-on


Expected Results:  
Tabbar shouldn't eat that much time.

Faster Fox   helps quantifying the perceived lag with its 'Page Load Timer'.

Comment 1

[holgbert]

Among several themes I tested, even the minimalistic ones
 only "Phoenity Modern" seems to behave reasonably.

Comment 2

[A. Glez. B.]

I've got the same issue. I can open any number of windows with a single tab (tabbar not visible) and its fine but a soon as the tabbar is visible the page loading uses 100% cpu but then only when loading pages. I can have 100 tabs an my cpu load is normal provided all have already loaded.

Some others posted similiar issues in bug 269767.

My guess is something in the tab loading animation. I've seen this behavior only since FF3.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008070208 Firefox/3.0.1

Comment 3

[Tyler Downer [He/Him]]

This is a mass search for bugs which are in the Firefox General component, are
UNCO, have not been changed for 500 days and have an unspecified version. 

Reporter, can you please update to Firefox 3.6.10 or later, create a fresh profile, http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/managing+profiles, and test again. If you still see the issue, please update this bug. If the issue is gone, please set the status to RESOLVED > WORKSFORME.

Comment 4

[KLB]

Closing bug due to its extreme age. Plus I never notice this issue.