722078 - Google maps (classic mode) are slower with UA > FF 4

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Guillaume Destuynder [:kang] [this account is no longer active]]

Note: this is using classic mode, not webgl.

I'm wondering why on Google Maps with a recent Firefox User Agent the tiles appear blurry then it loads higher rez image with a noticeable delay. It does not happen every time but it does most of the time.
Zooming in/out for a few seconds will reproduce that behavior (especially noticeable on zoom out)
Additionally the zoom is not smooth.


This makes using maps very slow.
Switching to another user agent (Chrome, Firefox 4, GoogleBot, etc) it does not do that anymore and maps are snappy again (I recommend Firefox 4 tho, the Chrome user agent breaks a lot of features)

Using Chrome with Firefox 12 (nightly) user agent does not have that behavior.

It appears as if the data was coming slower or if the requests were queued, or something was blocking Firefox for a short amount of time, thus i tried:

- Enabling/disabling SPDY (made no difference)
- Enabling HTTP request pipelining with SPDY off made things a good bit better. Enabling pipelining with SPDY has no effect (probably as expected).

I have the same experience with Firefox 11 (Aurora), probably is the same with older versions as well.

I have reproduced this on a fast windows 7 (i7 sandy bridge and high end nvidia graphics) and a fast laptop running linux (i7 sandy bridge as well, integrated intel graphics), so this isn't a "slow hardware" issue, and it doesn't seems to be a graphic driver issue either.

ps: activating webgl mode then switching to firefox 4 user agent (refresh page at this point) also makes maps a lot smoother (albeit not silky smooth) in webgl.
It would be jerky otherwise. It also displays blurry tiles with user agent of Firefox 12, and does not with Firefox 4 UA. Odd. Can't reproduce in Chrome either. (tracking bug for webgl slowlyness is 697443)

Comment 1

[Guillaume Destuynder [:kang] [this account is no longer active]]

Seems fixed in FF 18. Can't reproduce anymore.