Over the last few months, I’ve been talking about all of the work we put into making Australis feel fast when it shipped in Firefox 29.

I talked about where we started with our performance work, and how we grappled with the ts_paint and tpaint performance (“talos”) tests. After that, I talked a bit about the excellent tools we have (and ones we developed ourselves) to make finding our performance bottlenecks easier.

After a brief delay, I rounded out the series by talking about our tab animation performance work, and the customization transition performance work.

I think over the course of working on these things, I’ve learned quite a bit about performance work in general. If I had to distill it down to a few tidbits, it’d be:

Measure first to get a baseline, then try to improve. (Alternatively, “you can’t improve what you can’t measure”)

Finding the solutions to performance problems is usually the easy part. The hard part is finding and isolating the problems to begin with.

While performance work can be a bit of a grind, users do feel and appreciate the efforts. It’s totally worth it.

So that’s it on the series. Enjoy your zippy Firefox!