4 ms·

What are you doing that makes performance that bad? It sounds like GWT is generating bad code...

• cromwellian 12y ago
  It's nothing to do with JS code execution, the problem is in the rendering engine, essentially too much repainting and rendering stalls, and too little GPU accelerated animation paths. Javascript is in a very good state these days in terms of cross browser compatibility, and while CSS support has converged between browsers in terms of correctness, CSS support has not converged on performance between browsers. Safari, Chrome Firefox, and IE have wildly different animation performance hazards on the same markup and debugging this often isn't trivial, for example, finding out that the GPU is stalling on texture uploads deep inside of the render loop. One bright point, is that apps like Inbox are forcing these issues to the front, as is libraries like Polymer/Material Design. As the issues are raised and fixed, jank free rendering on mobile web platforms improves, hopefully reducing the need for native apps.
  • Touche 12y ago
    Glad to hear that these improvements are being addressed, but if the problem was animations why not opt-out of those when performance is an issue?
    • sp332 12y ago
      Inbox is a showcase for Material design, which makes heavy use of animations. If you don't need the animations, you can just use the gmail.com page anyway.
  • AshleysBrain 12y ago
    Why is poor performance in one browser a reason to completely drop support for that browser? If it works correctly albeit slowly, why not support it anyway? Then the slow experience is motivation for the browser vendor to improve it as well.
    • JshWright 12y ago
      Because users aren't going to blame the browser vendor for the poor experience?
      • Touche 12y ago
        Users won't get to use the site at all.
    • jamesgeck0 12y ago
      You can spoof the user agent in Firefox and see for yourself. It's _really bad_, bordering on completely unusable (at least, it was at launch). Inbox uses a lot of animation, and having that animation run at a couple frames per second makes an exceptionally poor user experience. If I worked on Inbox, I wouldn't feel comfortable releasing anything like that on Firefox either, even if it was gated with a disclaimer. It wouldn't reflect well on Google or Mozilla.
    • dblohm7 12y ago
      That would require them to file bugs against the browser. In the case of the sparse array issue, nobody had filed anything until a Mozillian read about the issue here on HN. It was fixed in Nightly the same day.
  • sanderjd 12y ago
    Extremely interesting! Would love to see blog posts on debugging GPU stalling during browser render loops, but I suppose you are all probably too busy actually doing that really hard stuff to be writing blog posts about it!