910223 - Story - Firefox Start Transition(s)

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Tracking Graveyard :: Metro Operations, defect, P1)

Description

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

Story: 

As a Metro Firefox user, I experience a Firefox Start page that is completely loaded before I see it or which completes into view in an enjoyable transition.

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Today, Firefox Start loads in a series of visible and jarring updates that have tile content filling in a seemingly random order. We need to hide these transitions behind the splash screen or make them feel ordered in their transitions rather than chaotic.  Could we do something like fill them in offscreen and animate them swooping in from the right to left in columns or something like that? Yuan, Shorlander, what should we do here to feel Metro?

Comment 1

[Sam Foster [:sfoster] (he/him)]

What I have immediately in mind is probably 2 or 3. But I'll give p=5 to give us some space for ideas that Yuan or Shorlander have.

Comment 2

[Sam Foster [:sfoster] (he/him)]

I think I can smooth out the loading experience a bit by having some empty (optionally visible) tiles in place in our Start.xul, which become bound and populated as their data becomes available. That should stop things jumping around so much. Some transitions may become difficult for us as we currently have a baked in expectation that operations like adding and removing items from the grids are atomic and synchronous. But with that caveat I'm open to ideas and suggestions.

Comment 3

[Marco Mucci [:MarcoM]]

Hey Yuan, requesting a UX review to determine if this story can be resolved before the end of Iteration #18 this Monday.

Comment 4

[Yuan Wang(:Yuan) – Mobile Firefox Design Lead]

Hi Marco, I talked to Sam about the transition yesterday. I suggested Bug 934714. I think we should close this story once Bug 934714 is finished.

Comment 5

[Marco Mucci [:MarcoM]]

Thanks Yuan.  I've added Bug 934714 as a dependency to this story.  When it has been completed the story can be resolved.

Comment 6

[Sam Foster [:sfoster] (he/him)]

All dependencies resolved. We still need to do a round of profiling and optimization on the startup generally and start page performance specifically, but this story is complete as it stands.

Comment 7

[Manuela Muntean [Away]]

Verified as fixed for iteration #19, on Win 8 64-bit, with latest Nightly (build ID: 20131208030204): the loading progress bar doesn't show on the Start page and the loading experience seems to be smooth.