>
>
> A6. Panning/Zooming: Bad/OK.
>
> I get lots of checkerboarding if I pan quickly, moreso than in other
> mobile browsers. Zooming is OK for me, but I do see complaints about it
> in the app store, and the graphics quality during zooming is lower than
> stock, so maybe we are using that to compensate for lower underlying
> performance.
There are tradeoffs that could be made here, but this surprises me
greatly. I generally feel that Firefox is just so stupendously better at
panning/zooming than stock...
For example, we allow you to pan and zoom as fast as the chrome will
allow you to do it (which is damn-fast): we asynchronously get updates
for the new regions or zoomed pixels. We *could* intentionally slow down
scrolling so that you can't scroll as fast (so that painting is more
visible), but in general that sounds like the wrong tradeoff.
We should definitely look at making the checkerboard less visible (using
the page background color etc), but I was pretty sure that this was
something where we were winning hands-down, and I'd really like to
understand the opposite viewpoint better.
> C2. Single-Process Architecture.
>
> We apparently have evidence that IPC is slowing us down. I don't have
> any measurements there, so I don't know much about the problem. But
> again, we need to think hard about whether the current multiprocess
> architecture is going to get us to where we want to be (taking into
> account any predicted improvements in Android IPC) and if it won't, it's
> time to do something about that.
We'd have to measure really carefully: the basic trade in multi-process is:
* resilience from content misbehaving or large pages causing UI lag
* much better UI responsiveness when panning/zooming (although
apparently the perception is mixed here!)
* increased memory usage
* IPC overhead (?)
I don't think we can possible make this call until we understand the
magnitude of the memory/IPC overhead
--BDS
Also,
* Resilience against OOM crashes with ridiculously large web pages.
I get this from time to time on Fennec. (I don't have a lot of RAM on
my phone.)
Ehsan