

Mobile Firefox: Measuring how a browser feels - AndrewDucker
http://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2012/06/26/mobile-firefox-measuring-how-a-browser-feels/

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pfraze
Speaking of Mozilla mobile, make sure you see this talk [1] on their recent
product designs. Don't know if this article's android browser is the same as
the ios browser in the talk, but the ios browser looks great.

[1] <https://air.mozilla.org/product-design-at-mozilla/>

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wslh
Opera mobile works better. For example, neither Firefox nor Chrome work well
when I try to submit an item on HN.

I am talking about the Android platform

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wslh
Stupid downvote. I write a fact and someone prefers fallacies

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ender7
This is a really good step forward, but it's disappointing to see the author
using FPS to measure UI responsiveness (I've harped on this before:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3777058>).

While FPS is a decent measure of performance in constant-load applications
such as the fishbowl, it's really, really bad for sporadic-load applications
such as most UIs.

For measuring UI responsiveness, you should really use frame delay, which is
the greatest elapsed time between any two concurrent frames during a UI event.
If your swipe gesture has a frame delay above ~33ms, it will look bad, even if
your measured framerate is ~30fps.

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Retric
One of the big problems with frame delay is it tends to round up. On a 60FPS
device 30.1FPS generally means you miss one out of every 2 refreshes. But a
35ms frame delay and you missed 2 refreshes and can even lose 3 which is
~100ms and rather noticeable.

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ender7
True, but having 30.1FPS doesn't protect you from that phenomenon either. If
you maintain 30.1FPS over a long period of time, it means that, yes, you
generally get one out of every 2 refreshes.

The problem is that UI interaction events can take place over very short
stretches -- say ~200ms. That's only a handful of frames, which reduces the
quality of any metric that relies of averages (such as FPS). I don't really
care if I get 1 out of every 2 refreshes as measured over 2 or 3 minutes, I
care about the first 5 frames after I swipe the screen.

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densh
I don't know if it's a good place to ask this question but what happend to
Firefox for Android tablets? I hasn't been updated for some time. Can
developers share any details about that?

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sp332
According to [http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/06/hands-on-firefox-
for-...](http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/06/hands-on-firefox-for-android-
may-become-your-favorite-android-browser/) it's still in active development
but isn't yet feature-complete.

~~~
AaronMT
Right.

We currently don't support tablets in this release as development did not
finish in time for this '1.0' style release. Fortunately, you can test out
Nightly (our developer oriented release channel) which has some tablet-
optimized changes available for download at <http://nightly.mozilla.org> [I'm
a Mozilla QA Engineer]

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lucianm
Let's hope they will do the same thing on Mac. Maybe they can get some tips
from Camino team.

