Measuring reduced checkerboarding in mobile Fennec

After my post on measuring checkerboarding in mobile Firefox, Clint Talbert (my fearless manager) suggested I run a before and after test to measure the improvement that just landed as part of bug 709512. After a bit of cleanup, I did so, measuring the delta between my build on December 20th and the latest version of Aurora. The difference is pretty remarkable: at least on the LG G2X that I’ve been using for testing, we’ve gone from checkerboarding between 10–20% of the time and not checkerboarding almost at all (in between two runs of the test with the Aurora build, there is exactly one frame that checkerboards). All credit to Chris Lord for that!

See the video evidence for yourself. Before:

After: