Saturn Valley

Improved performance is a key goal of Firefox 3.5 and beyond. We have our work cut out for us on the Places team.

For example, if you have lots of bookmarks or history, you might have noticed that searching in the history sidebar or bookmarks library can be a little, uh, unresponsive. When you search or click a tag, folder, or history container in one of the sidebars or library, Firefox drops everything to fetch your results. I’ve been working on making these actions asynchronous so that Firefox can walk and chew gum.

Try out a test build here. It’s based off of Minefield, the trunk version of Firefox. Warning: You can use this with your default Firefox profile, but only if you normally use Firefox 3.0, the current 3.5 nightly, the current Minefield nightly, or 3.5 RC 1. (As always, however, it’s a good idea to backup your profile before you try any experimental build.) If you run any of the 3.5 betas up to and including beta 4, you will need to make a copy of your profile and use it instead.

This build loads searches and tag, history, and query containers asynchronously. Instead of becoming unresponsive as it loads the entire set of results, Firefox will display results batch by batch as it retrieves them. That’s the plan anyway. Open up the sidebars and library and give it a shot.

A few notes about what not to expect:

• Responsiveness is still not 100%. Depending on the size of your history, searching and opening large containers remain a little jerky, especially the first time. Many disparate pieces impact responsiveness, and this one patch doesn’t touch them all. I hope you will notice some improvement, though, and I’d certainly like to hear if it makes things worse.
• This is not a cure-all. It addresses only the issues described in this post, not things like the awesomebar or deleting large numbers of bookmarks.
• Completeness and visual polish.

Follow along in bug 490714.