599711 - Tab animations are sluggish while sites are loading

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, defect)

Description

[Csaba Kozák [:WonderCsabo]]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:2.0b7pre) Gecko/20100924 Firefox/4.0b7pre
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:2.0b7pre) Gecko/20100924 Firefox/4.0b7pre

While I'm loading a site, tab animations (new tab, close tab) are sluggish. When the site loading is completed the animations will be smooth again.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open a new profile.
2. For being on the safe side, disable Flash player.
3. Open msnbc.com .
4. While it's loading, open a new tab, with the new tab button, and close that
tab. Do it several times.
Actual Results:  
The tab animations are sluggish while the site are loading. When it completes
loading, tab animations are smooth again.

Expected Results:  
The tab animations should be smooth while the pages are loading, too.

Note: this works with every site which uses some JS. For example while i log into Gmail.

Comment 1

[Robert O'Callahan (:roc) (email my personal email if necessary)]

Is this a regression? I suspect not.

Comment 2

[Csaba Kozák [:WonderCsabo]]

Then what is this?

Comment 3

[Robert O'Callahan (:roc) (email my personal email if necessary)]

A bug that we've had for as long as we've had new-tab animations?

Comment 4

[Csaba Kozák [:WonderCsabo]]

Yeah, i experience this a long time ago. If you can confirm this bug, please set it NEW.

Comment 5

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

For what it's worth, I can't reproduce this over here using msnbc (on Mac, though)....  I can see how loading a site that ties up CPU for a while could cause that behavior, of course, but that site doesn't seem to do that.  The only way to address the "ties up CPU for a while" issue is with e10s, and even that won't help if all your cores are busy.

Comment 6

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

Dao: is this a dupe? I remember there being a bug about how if we can't animate cleanly we should just bail on it and draw the tab w/o animation.

Comment 7

[Csaba Kozák [:WonderCsabo]]

Is this really an option? Chrome and Opera is animating every time, smoothly.
Drawing the tabs w/o animations looks much less awesome and obsolete.

Comment 8

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

It is really an option. The other option is chrome/content separation, which is out of scope for this request and certainly for Firefox 4.

Comment 9

[Csaba Kozák [:WonderCsabo]]

It is very said to hear. :( Isn't there any other way to fix it? 

I'm aware that chrome/content separation wont be in Fx4.0, especially not for this.

Comment 10

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

Other than complete content/chrome separation, maybe bug 598873 would help here.

Comment 11

[patrickjdempsey]

Is this possibly because of the progress-line animations?  I've noticed since they landed that the throbber animation is pausing.

Comment 12

[Brandon Watkins]

On my laptop they are sluggish even when sites aren't loading, if anything they are the most sluggish when opening empty tabs. 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCSJP9nG7Q8
Near the end of the video is the best example of what I usually see. The animations get jerky most of the time.
win7 64 bit
4gb ram
512MB Gddr3 mobility hd2600

Comment 13

[Brandon Watkins]

(In reply to comment #12)
> On my laptop they are sluggish even when sites aren't loading, if anything they
> are the most sluggish when opening empty tabs. 
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCSJP9nG7Q8
> Near the end of the video is the best example of what I usually see. The
> animations get jerky most of the time.
> win7 64 bit
> 4gb ram
> 512MB Gddr3 mobility hd2600

*forgot a spec, 2GHZ core2 duo

Comment 14

[Bruno Faria]

I can confirm this bug on a Asus 1201n using last nightly.


The video from Brandon shows exactly what my problem is..

Comment 15

[Bruno Faria]

Bisides Grafx Bot test 

http://brasstacks.mozilla.com/resultserv/data/results/fd6412c9-1596-408e-a0a9-caf629b086a1

Anything else I might run to help discover the cause?

Comment 16

[Can]

i can confirme this issue both in my desktop and laptop.

Comment 17

[Marco Castelluccio [:marco]]

I can confirm the issue. Today I tried Firefox 3.6.x and it was faster in opening new tabs.

Comment 18

[(dormant account)]

(In reply to Marco Castelluccio from comment #17)
> I can confirm the issue. Today I tried Firefox 3.6.x and it was faster in
> opening new tabs.

Marco 3.6 faster while loading pages? If it is, please change this to a Snappy:P2

Comment 19

[Marco Castelluccio [:marco]]

Sorry for the delay. However it's the tab animation that is faster.
Now that bug 593680 is about all the platforms, probably we could close this as its duplicate.