Australis Discussion

[KilliK]

Ugly Australis. Who like Australis?

I like Australis in my Thunderbird. When is Firefox catching up?

ditto. i love it and i am waiting for the FF edition.

[dbcooper.dk]

Aside from looking awful, the Australis theme also regresses performance. A lot.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=738491#c79

Tab animation performance measurements

I did some more measurements of australis vs default theme, focusing on paint
times of tab-open animation (which represent the regression better than frame
times, and is generally worse than during tab-close animation), and also tried
to break down the changes to evaluate how they contribute to the regression.

Few average paint times during tab open animation:

Fast PC:
--------
Default theme: 5.6 ms
Australis: 8.6 ms (frame rate doesn't suffer)
Australis without tab borders: 6.8 ms
Australis without tab borders and clip-paths: 6.4 ms
Australis without tab borders and clip paths (HW accel off): 4.4 ms

Slow PC:
--------
Default theme: 11.4 ms
Default theme (HW accel off): 6.4 ms
Australis : 28.5 ms (frame rate about half of default theme)
Australis (HW accel off): 13.8 ms
Australis without tab borders: 23.1 ms
Australis without tab borders and clip-paths: 19.3 ms

- For complete average measurements and test setup, see the attachment.

Summary:
--------
- Australis increases paint times by about 50% on a fast PC (frame rate doesn't
suffer) and by 200% (3x duration) on a slow PC (though frame rate suffers
less).
- SVG borders and clip paths account to about 50% of the regression.
- Turning HW acceleration off reduces paint times by about 30% on a fast PC and
by 50% on a slow PC (important to note that the embedded GPU of E-350 is quite
decent).

Australis generates the following warning during each animation frame, which
possibly increase the paint times both for the exception and for the wrapped
children (during measurements, warnings were disabled at the error console.
When I enabled warnings, frame rates suffered considerably):

Warning: XUL box for _moz_generated_content_after element contained an inline
#text child, forcing all its children to be wrapped in a block.
Source File: chrome://browser/content/tabbrowser.xml
Line: 1014 (that's: fm.setFocus(newBrowser, focusFlags); )

[MINIDOU]

maybe because they are just in a step of designing and quickly build it and not optimizing

[patrickjdempsey]

Back during Firefox 4.0 development, several features considered crucial... including a not-nearly-as-extreme overlapping tab system, were ditched because of performance regressions. So this seems more like a case of fish-bowl memory.

[Omega X]

SVG. Why am I not surprised.

[Frank Lion]

maybe because they are just in a step of designing and quickly build it and not optimizing

Nope, it doesn't work like that. It's not like anyone is designing the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel here, you just have to code it right and use the right graphics in the right place from day one.

Ask Patrick.

viewtopic.php?p=11686547#p11686547 ..and more on the next page.

Yeah, a 'theme' UI, which is all this is, can impact performance a lot.

[Joker1337]

still not understand, why they dont use HTML5 Canvas which is much faster the SVG...

[juanj78]

Question about OSX Australis Tabs.

A guy named Mike Conley, managed to get tabs in titlebar on mac.
https://etherpad.mozilla.org/weekly-aus ... checkpoint


Does anybody knows were to find a try/test build with this?

[patrickjdempsey]

Does anybody knows were to find a try/test build with this?

How about you wait for the developers in that chat to respond since they are the people most likely to know.

still not understand, why they dont use HTML5 Canvas which is much faster the SVG...

No, the real question is why didn't they get someone with intimate knowledge of strengths and weaknesses of the available technologies on this platform to either do all of the design, or at least advise the designer on the best course of action? Some problems simply are not worth inventing your way out of. If they reverted back to Firefox 3.x-style CSS tabs they would be faster, more compatible with tab-modifying extensions, easier to maintain and change, easier to support with Personas, and easier for users to modify. And if they would bother to FIX some of the problems they have with calculating tab width and tab margins then maybe tabs could even have gaps in between them without having to use ridiculously fragile and performance-expensive technologies.

[juanj78]

Asked more questions in the past in the chatfeature, never got a response... therefore asking also here

[WaltS48]

Question about OSX Australis Tabs.

Does anybody knows were to find a try/test build with this?

Maybe in the UX build folder.

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/ ... latest-ux/

[juanj78]

Using UX allready, its not showing any option to get tabs in the titlebar

I do see a 'browser.tabs.drawInTitlebar' setting, but that is allready set to 'true' but it does not work (os x 10.8.2)

[patrickjdempsey]

That wouldn't be in UX. UX is really for trying out things that don't require serious hackery to get to work. Serious hackery projects happen in try-builds which someone would have to direct you to.

[_Alexander]

they need to fix this first,
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=824845

[juanj78]

@Patrickdempsey,
Thats were i'm looking for a trybuild with tabs in title bar on osx, guess mister conley got it done

@_Alexander
Thats a bug related to windows, i'm talking about OSX.