Re: PSA (Windows): Startup Skeleton UI Enabled on Nightly

[Jared Wein (Mozilla)]

I'd like to second Mike's note. Congratulations to Doug, Emma, and everyone
else who worked tirelessly on this feature to improve perceived
performance. Your work will have a lasting effect and is a big step forward
in Firefox's story as the fastest browser in the market.

- Jared

On Thu, Jan 7, 2021 at 10:55 AM Mike Conley  wrote:

> dthayer,
>
> Congratulations to you and emalysz for getting this enabled in Nightly! I
> know it's been a long slog, but I think this is going to make a very
> perceivable improvement to our startup responsiveness.
>
> -Mike
>
> On Thu, 7 Jan 2021 at 07:20, Sebastian Zartner  >
> wrote:
>
> > On Wednesday, January 6, 2021 at 10:55:22 PM UTC+1, Doug Thayer wrote:
> > > On 1/6/2021 1:51 PM, Mike Hommey wrote:
> > >
> > > > On Wed, Jan 06, 2021 at 01:46:52PM -0800, Doug Thayer wrote:
> > > >> On 1/6/2021 1:44 PM, Mike Hommey wrote:
> > > >>
> > > >>> On Wed, Jan 06, 2021 at 01:30:00PM -0800, Doug Thayer wrote:
> > >  On Wed, Jan 6, 2021 at 1:23 PM Mike Hommey 
> > wrote:
> > > 
> > > > On Wed, Jan 06, 2021 at 11:57:18AM -0800, Doug Thayer wrote:
> > > >> If you don't spend any time on Nightly in Windows 10, please
> feel
> > free to
> > > >> disregard this.
> > > >>
> > > >> tl;dr: we're sometimes creating the first window differently
> than
> > usual,
> > > > so
> > > >> be on the lookout for breakages.
> > > >>
> > > >> On 2021-01-05, a change landed in Nightly which enabled the
> > pre-XUL
> > > > skeleton
> > > >> UI [1]. This is a feature which allows us to create the first
> > window and
> > > >> populate it with a non-interactive placeholder UI before we load
> > > > xul.dll. On
> > > >> some systems, this can mean we can give visual indication of
> > Firefox
> > > >> launching as much as 15 seconds sooner than normal (loading
> > xul.dll can
> > > > take
> > > >> a while). We're hoping this could be a big win for users who
> > experience
> > > > very
> > > >> slow startups, and we also hope it will improve the overall
> > snappiness of
> > > >> startup even on fast systems.
> > > > What does the placeholder UI look like?
> > > >
> > >  Colors and layout can vary, but the basic look is this:
> > >  [image: image.png]
> > > >>> The image attachment didn't quite work.
> > > >> Woops. Here is a link: https://i.imgur.com/R4ynXW5.png
> > > > Does the placement and the size of that window vary?
> > > It does. It uses values persisted to the registry based on the most
> > > recent run of the default profile, scoped by the path to the
> executable.
> > > The registry values can be found at
> > > HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Mozilla\Firefox\PreXULSkeletonUISettings.
> >
> > I am running Nightly 86.0a1 (2021-01-07) 64bit on Windows 10 on a freshly
> > created profile and checked that the browser.startup.preXulSkeletonUI
> > preference is set to true, though instead of seeing the UI I get a blank
> > white window. I remember, I tested this feature like a month or two ago
> and
> > it did work before. Is that expected? If not, please let me know what
> > information is needed to track this down and I'll file a bug for it.
> >
> > Also, regarding the registry values, I only see one for the theme with a
> > key referring to the path of the Nightly executable. How will you handle
> > different profiles?
> >
> > Besides those issues, I'm really happy to see this coming. It improves
> > perceived start up speed a lot, especially on less powerful machines.
> >
> > Sebastian
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> >
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Mozilla Corporation
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Re: Dogfooding Warp

[Jared Wein (Mozilla)]

Hi Jan,

Thanks for the update and congratulations on reaching this milestone.

Would you like to add Warp to the list of experimental features in
about:preferences? When a feature is listed there, it will appear in crash
stats and about:support, and also give users an easy way to enable/disable.
Feel free to contact me off-list if you are interested. I'm happy to help.

Thanks,
Jared

On Tue, Sep 15, 2020 at 8:58 AM Jan de Mooij  wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> The SpiderMonkey (JS) team has been working on a significant update to
> our JITs called WarpBuilder (or just Warp) [0,1]. Before we enable
> Warp by default in Nightly (hopefully next cycle in 83) we need your
> help dogfooding it.
>
> Warp improves performance by reducing the amount of internal type
> information that is tracked, optimizing for a broader spectrum of
> cases, and by leveraging the same CacheIR optimizations used by last
> year’s BaselineInterpreter work [2]. As a result, Warp has a much
> simpler design and improves responsiveness and page load performance
> significantly (we're seeing 5-15% improvements on many visual metrics
> tests). Speedometer is about 10% faster with Warp. The JS engine also
> uses less memory when Warp is enabled.
>
> To enable Warp in Nightly:
>
> 1. Update to a recent Nightly
> 2. Go to about:config and set the "javascript.options.warp" pref to true
> 3. Restart the browser
>
> We're especially interested in stability issues and real-world
> performance problems. Warp is currently slower on various synthetic JS
> benchmarks such as Octane (which we will continue investigating in the
> coming months) but should perform well on web content.
>
> If you find any issues, please file bugs blocking:
>
> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1613592
>
> If you notice any improvements, we'd love to hear about those too.
>
> Finally, we want to thank our amazing contributors André Bargull and
> Tom Schuster for their help implementing and porting many
> optimizations.
>
> Turning Warp on is only our first step, and we expect to see a lot of
> new optimization work over the next year as we build on this. We are
> excited for what the future holds here.
>
> Thanks!
> The Warp team
>
> [0] WarpBuilder still utilizes the backend of IonMonkey so we don't
> feel it has earned the WarpMonkey name just yet.
> [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1613592
> [2]
> https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/08/the-baseline-interpreter-a-faster-js-interpreter-in-firefox-70/
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Re: Experimental Features in about:preferences

[Jared Wein (Mozilla)]

Thanks Sebastian. I intend to have the features listed on that webpage
reflected in the new about:preferences#experimental page.

Cheers,
Jared

On Sat, Jun 27, 2020 at 5:35 PM Sebastian Zartner <
sebastianzart...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I'd like to point out that there is also an MDN page listing experimental
> features:
>
> https://developer.mozilla.org/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Experimental_features
>
> Maybe that page could be linked to from the new section? And maybe other
> features listed there could be added to the section?
>
> Best regards,
>
> Sebastian
>
> On Friday, June 26, 2020 at 6:14:23 AM UTC+2, Jared Wein (Mozilla) wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > The Firefox Preferences (about:preferences) is gaining a new section
> called
> > "Firefox Experiments" ("Nightly Experiments" on Nightly builds). This
> > section will list features that are in-development or otherwise awaiting
> > some kind of feedback before being enabled by default.
> >
> > Experimental features can be displayed based on release channel (Nightly,
> > DevEdition, Beta, Release) and platform (Windows, macOS, Linux). This
> work
> > is based on FeatureGates[1] as implemented by the Normandy team.
> >
> > As of bug 1648223 this work is now enabled by default in Firefox Nightly
> > builds, and may ship with Firefox 79 though could be held back to Firefox
> > 80 if we want to get a larger list of experimental features.
> >
> > If you have a feature that you would like wider testing of, please file a
> > bug in Firefox::Preferences and add your feature to
> > toolkit/components/featuregates/Features.toml. See the documentation[1]
> for
> > details on feature definitions. Bug 1648223 is on autoland now and
> includes
> > some updates to the documentation.
> >
> > A new section, "Experimental Features", has been added to about:support
> to
> > list the state of the features to help with bug reports. Bug 1644544 is
> on
> > autoland to annotate crash-stats with the state of the enabled
> Experimental
> > Features and there is planned work to allow engineers to optionally
> disable
> > their features when in Safe Mode.
> >
> > Thank you for reading this far. Please let me know if you have any
> > questions,
> > Jared
> >
> > [1]
> >
> https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/toolkit/components/featuregates/featuregates/index.html
> >
> > --
> > Jared Wein
> > Staff Software Engineer, Firefox
> > Mozilla Corporation
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Experimental Features in about:preferences

[Jared Wein (Mozilla)]

Hello,

The Firefox Preferences (about:preferences) is gaining a new section called
"Firefox Experiments" ("Nightly Experiments" on Nightly builds). This
section will list features that are in-development or otherwise awaiting
some kind of feedback before being enabled by default.

Experimental features can be displayed based on release channel (Nightly,
DevEdition, Beta, Release) and platform (Windows, macOS, Linux). This work
is based on FeatureGates[1] as implemented by the Normandy team.

As of bug 1648223 this work is now enabled by default in Firefox Nightly
builds, and may ship with Firefox 79 though could be held back to Firefox
80 if we want to get a larger list of experimental features.

If you have a feature that you would like wider testing of, please file a
bug in Firefox::Preferences and add your feature to
toolkit/components/featuregates/Features.toml. See the documentation[1] for
details on feature definitions. Bug 1648223 is on autoland now and includes
some updates to the documentation.

A new section, "Experimental Features", has been added to about:support to
list the state of the features to help with bug reports. Bug 1644544 is on
autoland to annotate crash-stats with the state of the enabled Experimental
Features and there is planned work to allow engineers to optionally disable
their features when in Safe Mode.

Thank you for reading this far. Please let me know if you have any
questions,
Jared

[1]
https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/toolkit/components/featuregates/featuregates/index.html

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Re: Removing the XUL grid implementation

[Jared Wein (Mozilla)]

Congrats! This is a major accomplishment and required a lot of work. Nice
job to all!

On Fri, Apr 24, 2020 at 1:34 PM Tim Nguyen  wrote:

> Hello folks,
>
> After a year of work, all XUL grid usages have been removed from Firefox!
> The Thunderbird team also has been doing a lot of hard work on their side.
>
> This means the XUL grid implementation can now be removed:
> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1525737
>
> I'm planning to remove the XUL grid implementation at the beginning of the
> Firefox 78 cycle to leave time to address potential regressions from the last
> removal  and for
> the Thunderbird team to remove their last usage
> .
>
> Thanks to everyone who reviewed my grid removal patches and to Daniel
> Holbert and Emilio Cobos Àlvarez for the platform work that made this
> possible!
>
> Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns.
>
> Cheers,
> Tim
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>


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Jared Wein
Staff Software Engineer, Firefox
Mozilla Corporation
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