765228 - Time from startup to completely rendered web page is poor

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[William Lachance (:wlach)]

How to reproduce:

* Load a webpage from scratch
* Wait to see the page complete rendering

Expected:

* Fennec native is within ballpark of performance of Google Chrome for Android or Android's native browser.

Actual:

* Fennec native is substantially worse.

Quoting from bug 723361 (currently private):

I went ahead and wrote the necessary code to do a cross-browser startup comparison using Eideticker. I decided to create a benchmark that determined the first frame of an HDMI capture which represents a more-or-less finished version of a page -- in this case the new york times. You can translate that into "# of seconds to see completed webpage" by dividing it by 60. Unfortunately the news here is not particularly good: 

Browser,result1,result2,result3,average
com.android.chrome,199,206,195,200 = 3.33s avg
org.mozilla.firefox,375,365,385,375 = 6.25s avg
org.mozilla.firefox_beta,423,400,420,414 = 6.9s avg
com.google.android.browser,221,185,195,200 = 3.33s avg

What this benchmark seems to show is that the Fennec beta is actually marginally *worse* than the current released XUL fennec, as well as being worse than all the other browsers overall. Looking at the captures myself, I can see that the story isn't actually as bad as the numbers initially suggest-- although it takes longer to actually get a completed rendered web page with the new fennec, we do see the browser chrome much earlier with the new beta (so the user experience is better).

Comment 1

[William Lachance (:wlach)]

See bug 760152 for some already committed work on this bug (which unfortunately doesn't seem to help much).

Comment 2

[Mike Hommey [:glandium]]

My experience with Fennec as a user gives the feeling that network access sucks badly. I'm not even talking about startup here, I'm talking about getting any page displayed.

Comment 3

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

(In reply to Mike Hommey [:glandium] from comment #2)
> My experience with Fennec as a user gives the feeling that network access
> sucks badly.

+1. I filed bug 758338 for this issue and plan to spend some time investigating this.

Comment 4

[BMO Automation]

We have completed our launch of our new Firefox on Android. The development of the new versions use GitHub for issue tracking. If the bug report still reproduces in a current version of [Firefox on Android nightly](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fenix) an issue can be reported at the [Fenix GitHub project](https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/). If you want to discuss your report please use [Mozilla's chat](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Matrix#Connect_to_Matrix) server https://chat.mozilla.org and join the [#fenix](https://chat.mozilla.org/#/room/#fenix:mozilla.org) channel.