857390 - Find a better way to indicate tab "restoring" versus tab "loading"

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

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

Cameron says:

--
I feel like I'm sometimes tricked that the browser is loading a page  from the network when instead it has loaded it from the cache.  The  throbber spins, and it takes some number of seconds to load before it  shows the page, but then reading the page closely I can see that it's as  I last opened it rather than freshly loaded.  I'm not exactly sure when  this happens -- maybe on session restore?  Anyway, I don't know what it  should be so slow to load the page when it's from the cache.  (I've got  a Galaxy Nexus btw.)
--

This is probably because we're restoring a tab. It looks like there are two problems here: one is that restoring a tab takes longer than a user would expect, and the other is that restoring a tab looks identical to refreshing a tab.

Fixing the first issue probably involves much cache re-work which are in various stages of being done by the necko team. The second issue could probably be solved with some UI hacks (like replacing the progress spinner with some other animation more indicative of "restoring") so we can use this bug to track that.

As an example, for restoring tabs, we could leave off the progress spinner entirely and maybe do some animation in the content area, like tiles appearing one at a time, and then once all the tiles are in place the actual page fades in. The tile-animation delay would give us time to actually load the page in the background so that we can fade it in smoothly once that's done.

Comment 1

[:Margaret Leibovic]

(In reply to Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail]) from comment #0)

> As an example, for restoring tabs, we could leave off the progress spinner
> entirely and maybe do some animation in the content area, like tiles
> appearing one at a time, and then once all the tiles are in place the actual
> page fades in. The tile-animation delay would give us time to actually load
> the page in the background so that we can fade it in smoothly once that's
> done.

Another idea that comes to mind is showing a greyed-out screenshot of the page that we're restoring, but we'd probably still want to do something else to give an indication of progress.

Comment 2

[BMO Automation]

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