507100 - Opening a new _emtpy_ window (i.e. about:blank) takes a really noticeable time

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[r.goyet]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_7; fr-fr) AppleWebKit/530.19.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.2 Safari/530.19
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; fr; rv:1.9.1.1) Gecko/20090715 Firefox/3.5.1

Pressing Command-N to open a new window takes about 1 second. On one of the fatest MacPros. Opening a new window in Camino or Safari is virtually instantaneous.

From my own little benchmark : opening 50 windows in Safari or Camino takes about 5 seconds, which is I guess limited only by my keyboard repeat rate (1 window every 0.1 second).
On Firefox, it is extremely sluggish. Opening 50 windows takes over a minute, which is more than 10 times slower

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Start Firefox
2. Press Command-N
3. Wait forever…
Actual Results:  
Opening a new window takes over 1 second. This might not seem like a big deal, but it actually is. Opening a new browser window is a very frequent action, and having to wait a second is extremely annoying. Andconfusing : you don't really know wether your 'New window' command has been taking into account.

Expected Results:  
It should open the new window in a flash. Camino does that, Safari does that, and even Firefox on Windows does that too.

-> No extensions loaded in Firefox
-> Default Mac theme

Comment 1

[r.goyet]

Attachment: Sample of Firefox when pressing Command-N non-stop. Firefox was trying to open a lot of windows

Comment 2

[Tyler Downer [He/Him]]

Reporter, are you still seeing this issue with Firefox 3.6.13 or later in safe mode or a fresh profile? If not, please close. These links can help you in your testing.
http://support.mozilla.com/kb/Safe+Mode
http://support.mozilla.com/kb/Managing+profiles

Comment 3

[r.goyet]

Hi Tyler,

I'm still seeing this issue. I'm on a Mac OS X 10.6.6 machine, with an Core i7 processor which is supposedly pretty fast.
As my machine is significantly faster than when I entered the bug, the delay is now smaller, but still really noticeable and *really* annoying. As a consequence, on the Mac I moved to Chrome where opening windows is just instantaneous.

Comment 4

[Vlad [QA]]

WFM on Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:6.0a2) Gecko/20110602 Firefox/6.0a2.

The windows are opened almost instantaneous.