Back in the fall of 2011, we took a targeted look at Firefox responsiveness issues. We identified a number of short term projects that together could achieve significant responsiveness improvements in day-to-day Firefox usage. Project Snappy kicked off at the end of the year with the goal of improving Firefox responsiveness.

Although Snappy first contributed fixes to Firefox 11, Snappy’s most noticeable contributions to date are landing with Firefox 13. Currently in beta, this release includes a number of responsiveness related fixes, most notably tabs-on-demand, cycle collector improvements, and start-up optimization.

Tabs -on-Demand

Tabs-on-demand is a feature that reduces start-up time for Firefox windows with many tabs. In Firefox 12, all tabs are loaded on start-up. For windows with many tabs this may cause a delay before you can interact with Firefox as each tab must load its content. In Firefox 13, only the active tab will load. Loading of background tabs is deferred until a tab is selected. This results in Firefox starting faster as tabs-on-demand reduces processing requirements, network usage, and memory consumption.

Cycle Collector

As you interact with the browser and Web content, memory is allocated as needed. The Firefox cycle collector works to automatically free some of this memory when it is no longer needed. This action reduces Firefox’s memory usage. In Firefox 13, the cycle collector is more efficient, spending less time examining memory that is still in use, which results in less pauses as you use Firefox.

Start-up

Firefox start-up time is visible to all users. Our investigation into start-up has identified a number of unoptimized routines in the code that executes before what we call “first paint”. “First paint” signifies when the Firefox user interface is first visible on your screen. In Firefox 13 we have optimized file calls, audio sessions, drag and drop, and overall IO, just to name a few. We are continuing to profile the Firefox start-up sequence to identify further optimizations that can be made in future releases.

There are numerous other Snappy fixes in Firefox 13 including significant improvements to IO contention, font enumeration, and livemark overhead. All of these fixes contribute to a more responsive experience. We are already working on further responsiveness fixes for future Firefox releases. You can expect to see Snappy improvements in upcoming releases in areas such as memory usage, shutdown time, network cache and connections, menus, and graphics.