Fixing new tab page performance regressions

August 14, 2012

As you probably already know, Firefox 13 introduced a neat new feature - the new tab page. We replaced the old blank page with a list of thumbnails of recently visited sites. While the feature itself works great for many people it has definitely made opening new tabs a little more noisy.

Do not show loading indicators

As we are now loading a real (although local) page, there are loading indicators when opening a new tab. The throbber starts to spin and the tab title changes to “Connecting…” until the page has loaded. That is a lot of unnecessary noise.

In bug 716108 (Firefox 17) we removed loading indicators for newly opened tabs. No spinning throbber, no flickering tab label. It only is a very subtle change but the whole action of opening a new tab feels a lot smoother again.

Preload new tab pages in the background

If you happen to have a slower machine you will notice that loading the new tab page takes a little while. It is a normal HTML (and partly XUL) page that we need to parse and render. As all tabs start out with a blank docShell you will first see a white canvas that then is replaced by “about:newtab”. As a last step all thumbnails will be loaded and drawn progressively.

Opening a new tab is a very frequent action so it should feel snappy and not get in your way at all. As optimizing the parsing and rendering stages any further is more than a non-trivial task I came up with a little trick in bug 753448. The idea is to preload the new tab page in the background so it has already loaded when users open a new tab. All we now have to do is switch docShells and the new tab page gets shown instantly.

You can give it a try as it landed in yesterday’s Nightly (2012-08-14). Just go to “about:config” and set “browser.newtab.preload” to “true”. This option is not yet enabled by default as we first have to figure out some minor talos regressions until it is ready for prime time.