

Australis Performance Post-mortem Part 4: On Tab Animation - khc
http://mikeconley.ca/blog/2014/05/14/australis-performance-post-mortem-part-4-on-tab-animation/

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ethana
I don't know...if Mozilla is still having problem with tab animations by now,
why not just scrap it all together until their multi-process gain some ground.

All this fancy animations they've added into Australis are non-essentials and
impacting their already super busy single threaded model.

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userbinator
Being not a fan of UI animation myself, I agree completely. The fastest way to
open/close a tab is to not animate it at all. To me, it's rather odd to see
concern about a ~5ms difference in animation speed, when they could've made
the whole animation take 0ms quite easily --- the faster an animation goes,
the more instantaneous and less animation-like it becomes, and when it gets
fast enough, there's no point in having any animation.

I wonder if removing all the user-initiated animation from the UI would
improve perceived responsiveness dramatically, since my browser has no tab
animation and a new tab appears instantaneously as far as I can tell.

That said, it's amazing in a somewhat shocking sort of way to see just how
many layers of abstraction and lines of code are involved in doing something
like a tab animation (I notice the article mentions CSS, Direct3D, Cairo, SVG,
and OpenGL), and then realise that in terms of human timescale, it's still
extremely fast.

~~~
acqq
I'd like to see the video with the side/by-side demonstration of "no
animation" vs "animation" of the tabs, synchronized to the moment of the
click.

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acqq
Reading the title it sounded like Australis is dead or its performance is dead
("post mortem" is Latin for "after death": post (“afterwards”) + mortem, from
mors (“death”).)

Reading the article (not carefully, I admit, and using google cache, I can't
get the page otherwise), I haven't figured out what the TART stands for. But
tl dr seems to be "we make this Australis UX revision, and then the tabs are
slow, and we see it on the fastest machines, then we search for causes, then
we fix them." Well yes, that's the right thing to do. Can somebody point to
something interesting in the article that I missed to recognize?

~~~
Ygg2
'Software postmortem' are done after the product is shipped or failed to ship.
We already know it's shipped.

~~~
acqq
For "failed to ship" I understand, but I wonder how "shipping" can be
equivalent to "death"? Post _mortem_ is always "after _death_ " not "after
birth":

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-
mortem_(disambiguation)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-
mortem_\(disambiguation\))

~~~
Ygg2
The project has entered maintenance mode. All development has ceased.

Yeah, I know what it means, it felt a bit weird at first (I'd go for
dissection to be honest). But languages don't change based on math principles.
It's from context of game/software postmortems:
[http://www.gamasutra.com/features/postmortem/](http://www.gamasutra.com/features/postmortem/)

Queer means strange, except it doesn't, gay means happy, except it doesn't.

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J_Darnley
Here's my post-mortem on Australis: I stopped using Firefox.

