Sure it’s Fast, But How Does it Handle?
From the Firefox 3.5 video by community member Vineel Reddy
Currently all the browser vendors are engaged in a pretty exciting race to see who can engineer the fastest Web browser. A lot of different aspects come into play when you are focusing on raw performance, including top speed (captured by a range of different benchmarks), zero to 60 (cold start up time, page load), and the slightly more amorphous topic of how well the thing handles (to quote Jobs, does it “scroll like butter”). We have loads of engineering resources focused on areas like top speed and start up, but we are also taking handling seriously.
Margaret Leibovic, an intern on the Firefox team has been working on what I believe will be one of the most important handling (or “perceptual performance”) improvements: adding an acceleration based scrolling model to Firefox on Windows and Linux.
Feedback
Check out her post for details, and please comment there with feedback so we can start to refine the scrolling model and work out any bugs.
If you have other ideas of how we can improve handling, please add them to this wiki page about perceived performance.
