For example, I feel like traffic isn’t bad if I’m constantly moving (even when it’s very slowly), compared to stop-and-go traffic (even when the “go” is fast). I feel like I’m getting there quicker even if it’s actually slower.

Animations help because they imply constant progress. So when loading a page, items shouldn’t simply appear. Individual elements (or the whole page all at once), should transition in (whether fade, zoom or some other appropriate effect) in some way that doesn’t tax the CPU or video card.

But worst of all is if animation implies progress that hasn’t been made. Moving backward is worse than stopping.

One very specific example: Compare the “Remember the password on this site” bar’s behavior on Firefox to Chrome: Firefox feels slower because there are lots of (ever-so-slight) stops as it expands out

It’s especially noticeable on trackpads, where you’re used to dragging a page as though it’s right in front of you–and then you scroll in Firefox and you’re reminded that there’s a computer there, the illusion is broken, because why else did that page teleport there instead if moving like a real page?

So yeah, I might switch back to Firefox if it started scrolling at one pixel per notch.

(This comment was written and edited on an iPod, so it might be a bit incoherent.)

In other terms: the UI must always react, snappy, regardless of what’s happening, to the extreme that a tab might be crashing but the UI still reacts.

This will allow also situations when even if something is taking too much time I can still fire searches and open tabs (even if they will be “white” until the other heavy task will unlock).

I know this is really complex and it can be summarized in: make the UI snappier.

Example: now I’ve just switched to Firefox and clicked a folder in the bookmark bar. On click nothing happened for a bit less of a second, then the menu appeared. It’s just a menu, and still it’s slow. If the data isn’t ready, just pop open the menu and *after* than load the content.

I think that the real answer is detach, detach, detach. It could be read also: do everything in another thread.

Hard, I know.

~

Tricks?

Animations helps, but the time gained is always minimal (you can’t make the user waiting too much, we’re talking about milliseconds).

Use empty UI elements, load them immediately and then load content.

I hope this comment could help. :P

“Things feel faster when they pop in. Currently Firefox does a lot of progressive loading then renders and re-flows the page in front of your eyes.

Bellow a certain time threshold it’s better to keep things behind a curtain and then draw everything at once to get that pop experience. After that threshold it will feel faster to display what you have rather then wait.”

The UI also feels quite outdated, compared to Safari and Chrome, because of it’s lack of UI animations, like moving tabs f.E.

For OS X: Make the UI clickable even if the window is inactive.

I guess that behaviour is to give the user hope, but it really is unhelpful. Honesty first, I’d say.

The reason being that if Gecko, and TraceMonkey, keeps improving, we will come to a point where handling improvements meets with speed improvements in the code itself… it something of a sweet spot, which I think would be nice to hit.

Also, any lag between the mouse and the interface makes things look very slow. For example the currently prefed off ctrl+tab preview window feels very laggy, not because it is but because the highlight is slower than the mouse.