FirefoxStartup

Summary

Firefox takes a relatively long time to start up, and this is more evident on ARM devices which are generally slower than x86/amd64 systems.

Release Note

Firefox launches significantly faster on ARM devices in Ubuntu 11.10.

Rationale

Firefox startup is slow because it is a large C++ app that does a lot of IO on startup. The slow SD/eMMC/USB storage used in ARM devices make this even more noticable.

User stories

First startup of Firefox after each reboot on an OEM netbook preinstalled with Ubuntu takes 12 seconds.

Assumptions

Design

You can have subsections that better describe specific parts of the issue.

Implementation

Upstream is well aware of the fact that Firefox could start up faster and have people working on the problem. They are addressing some of the issues for upcoming releases. Oneiric will ship with FF 6 or FF 7 so chances are some improvements will land in Ubuntu even if we do not do anything.

We will make a testcase for Linaro LAVA to chart startup time during Oneiric.

Upstream resources:

IRC: #startup channel on irc.mozilla.org

Wiki: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Projects/Startup_Time_Improvements

UI Changes

Code Changes

Possible changes to our Firefox packaging if preloading or other shell tricks are to be used to speed up cold start.

Migration

Test/Demo Plan

Unresolved issues

BoF agenda and discussion


CategorySpec

ARM/FirefoxStartup (last edited 2011-05-19 19:44:40 by 188-24-95-24)