790277 - Speculatively run the awesome screen top sites query

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: Awesomescreen, defect)

Description

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto [:gcp]]

Whenever the user clicks the awesomescreen to enter or search anything, he's going to run and see the top sites query.

We should speculatively run this query as soon as we're idle and keep the result handy, so the entries pop up instantaneously.

This is related to bug 785945, but cheating to get the default case as fast as possible.

Comment 1

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

We used to do something similar in XUL fennec. We ran the query and cached the results locally. I can't remember off-hand if we cached the entire resultset or just a limited number.

Comment 2

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto [:gcp]]

mbrubeck made the remark that we have to be careful here not to regress page load times or (if we'd do it in the background) interactive performance of the foreground app, if we speculatively load at the wrong moment.

What about just always remembering the last result, displaying that and only then firing the new query? In most cases the result won't change for top sites.

The problem then might be that either we change the result under the users finger, or that "top sites" updates always lag by one awesomebar click. The latter might be very acceptable.

Comment 3

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

We also need to remember to clear the cache when the user clears history.

Comment 4

[Lucas Rocha (:lucasr)]

I implemented awesomebar query caching in bug 721104 but we decided to move on with the idea because of the risk of caching cursors in memory. Maybe we should revisit the idea but cache the results in some other way?

Comment 5

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