723390 - Selective rendering proposal

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 683284

(Firefox :: General, enhancement)

Description

[u430111]

Thinking a method to reduce memory usage, why not use a selective rendering? In short terms, Gecko should render only the visible page based on the screen height, or better, 2-3 times the screen height (when the page isn't at one side but scrolled, Gecko could render a piece of page before and after the page position).

This should render less memory dependent contents, like images, because unrendered images could stay compressed in cache and decompressed when rendered, but after a scroll they could be unrendered to reduce memory usage, if they're offscreen.

This should be the behavior of WebKit as seen on iPhones and similas, where the GPU acceleration helps (Firefox uses it too, shouldn't be a problem to implement something similar at this).

Maybe this can be implemented as an option toggled by a checkbox, so powerful and high size ram pcs can leave it unchecked, where netbooks/tablets could benefit from this improvement, at the cost of a bit of cpu usage (but i saw an iPhone 3G time ago having no problem to scroll a page, but leaving a bit of a squared pattern)

Comment 2

[Jo Hermans]

More specifically, see bug 542158 and bug 661304.