Yet more adventures in mobile performance analysis

[ For more information on the Eideticker software I’m referring to, see this entry ]

Participated in an interesting meeting on checkerboarding in Firefox for Android yesterday. As a reminder, checkerboarding refers to the amount of time you spend waiting to see the full page after you do a swipe on your mobile device, and it’s a big issue right now : so much so that it puts our delivery goal for the new native browser at risk.

It seems like we have a number of strategies for improving performance which will likely solve the problem, but we need to be able to measure improvements to make sure that we’re making progress. This is one of the places where Eideticker could be useful (especially with regards to measuring us against the competition), though there are a few things that we need to add before it’s going to be as useful as it could be. The most urgent, as I understand, is to come up with a suite of tests which accurately represent the set of pages that we’re having issues with. The current main measure of checkerboarding that we’re using with eideticker is taskjs.org which, while an interesting test case in some ways, doesn’t accurately represent the sort of site that the user would normally go to in the wild (and thus be annoyed by). 😉

This is going to take a few days (and a lot of review: I’m definitely no expert when it comes to this stuff) to get right, but I just added two tests for the New York Times which I think are a step in the right direction of being more representative of real-world use cases. Have a look here:

http://wrla.ch/eideticker/dashboard/#/nytimes-scrolling
http://wrla.ch/eideticker/dashboard/#/nytimes-zooming

The results here actually aren’t as bad as I would have expected/remembered. There amount of checkerboarding after a zoom out is a bit annoying (I understand this a known issue with font caching, or something) but not too terrible. Still, any improvements that show up here will probably apply across a wide variety of sites, as the design patterns on the New York Times site are very common.

(P.S. yes, I know I promised a comparison with Google Chrome for Android last time: rest assured that’s still coming soon!)