730303 - about:home takes several seconds to show up on first run startup

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Lucas Rocha (:lucasr)]

I understand we want to prioritize showing the main UI as soon as possible but waiting for gecko to load before showing about:home has a very negative impact on the startup UX because the user will see a barely-funcional-weirdly-blank UI for a couple of seconds with no progress feedback on what's going on.

We have to show about:home as soon as we know main UI is up. That's way before gecko is loaded in a lot of devices.

Comment 1

[Sriram Ramasubramanian [:sriram]]

As per current code, we try to show about:home if no session-restore exists. Gecko loads after that.

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/file/tip/mobile/android/base/GeckoApp.java#l1752

Comment 2

[Doug Turner (:dougt)]

This is a terrible user experience at the moment.  We can't ship beta with a multi-second wait.

Comment 3

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

lets figure out why about:home is not being shown right away. session restore keeps about:home from being shown at all, and thats a separate bug.

Comment 4

[Sriram Ramasubramanian [:sriram]]

Is this bug still valid? We don't wait for Gecko to show about:home in our current code as I have mentioned above.

Comment 5

[Ed Morley [:emorley]]

mfinkle, is comment 3 meant to be private?

Comment 6

[Lucas Rocha (:lucasr)]

(In reply to Sriram Ramasubramanian [:sriram] from comment #4)
> Is this bug still valid? We don't wait for Gecko to show about:home in our
> current code as I have mentioned above.

We might not be waiting for gecko to show about:home but something has changed recently that makes about:home take way more to show up. This still needs investigation. I updated the summary to describe the more general issue here.

Comment 7

[Brad Lassey [:blassey] (use needinfo?)]

do we have a regression range for this?

Comment 8

[Brad Lassey [:blassey] (use needinfo?)]

I (and kbrosnan) only see this on first run. Given that, this is not a blocker. If anyone else is seeing this out side of first run (or first run after update), please re-nom.

Comment 9

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

I have also found that if you use the 'Quit' menu to close Fennec and then re-open, AboutHome appears instantly. More data that shows this is related to session restore. Bug 718240 should 'fix' this issue.

Comment 10

[Kevin Brosnan [Ex-Mozilla]]

I don't see the same sort of pauses that we saw a month ago.