M
Mike Conley
mikeconley.ca · Personal blog · on HN since 2011
Mike Conley, a Mozilla engineer, writes about Firefox front-end performance work, including startup time, tab switching, and tab closing.
What HN saysHN commenters point to it for Firefox performance fixes and profiling help, and note that he replies to people who write to him.
17HN people shared it
6linked it in comments
13stories submitted
214story points
6 years agolast shared
2011people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Improving Firefox Startup Time with the About:Home Startup Cache2 people · 6 points · first shared 2020 · 1 comments on HN
- 2Making tab switching faster in Firefox with tab warming1 people · 153 points · first shared 2018 · 100 comments on HN
- 3Australis Performance Post-mortem Part 4: On Tab Animation1 people · 36 points · first shared 2014 · 16 comments on HN
- 4Firefox Performance Update #31 people · 5 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
- 5No, that's not "it" for Thunderbird...1 people · 3 points · first shared 2012 · discussion on HN
- 6Making tabs close faster in multi-process Firefox1 people · 3 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 7Firefox Front-End Performance Update #121 people · 2 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 8Australis Performance Post-mortem Part 5: The Customize Mode Transition1 people · 2 points · first shared 2014 · discussion on HN
- 9Firefox Front-End Performance Update #131 people · 1 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 10Firefox/Thunderbird handmade leather wallet1 people · 1 points · first shared 2011 · discussion on HN
- 11Electrolysis Code Spelunking: How links open new windows in Firefox1 people · 1 points · first shared 2014 · discussion on HN
- 12Thunderbird will be the default e-mail client for Ubuntu Oneiric1 people · 1 points · first shared 2011 · discussion on HN
- 13Docshell in a nutshell part 1 original intents1 people · first shared 2014
- 14Monkey island 1 the secret of monkey island running via javascript1 people · first shared 2013
- 15Docshell in a nutshell part 2 the wonder years 1999 20041 people · first shared 2014
What HN people wrote when they linked it
aswan · 2019-09-03
> How much of a performance improvement does this make?
For a user with an SSD, perhaps not much. But there are still a lot of users out there with magnetic hard drives. Firefox has to do a decent amount of I/O at startup, and unneeded disk seeks add up for these users.
In addition, Firefox formerly checked for these files on the main thread, which is especially bad for performance. (Firefox engineer Mike Conley wrote about this at length at https://mikeconley.ca/blog/2019/05/16/a-few-words-on-main-thread-disk-…
If you read through the related bug (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1541233), you can see that folks went to some trouble to keep anything from breaking for people using these files today. The claims that this is a step toward removing the files completely is FUD.
jhatax · 2018-03-13
Mike Conley has picked up the Quantum performance baton from Ehsan, and has started posting Performance fixes on his blog [1]. Please write to him; he is good with replying, and will provide instructions on how to profile your Mac machines.
1. https://mikeconley.ca/blog/2018/03/01/firefox-performance-update-2/
yoasif_ · 2015-05-17
FYI, you can help submit a performance profile to Mozilla so they can work to resolve this: http://mikeconley.ca/blog/2015/05/04/electrolysis-and-the-big-tab-spin…
mconley · 2014-10-31
> I've never seen anyone dig through VCS history to gain a better understanding of code.
I'm actually going through the ancient CVS history of Mozilla Firefox in order to learn about a relatively poorly understood piece of code that's still in there to this day:
http://mikeconley.ca/blog/2014/07/07/docshell-in-a-nutshell-part-1-ori…
and
http://mikeconley.ca/blog/2014/08/10/docshell-in-a-nutshell-part-2-the…
wingi · 2013-06-11
Old Sierra games are availble with HTML5 at http://sarien.net/ - is the html5 ScrummVM really new?
http://mikeconley.ca/blog/2012/01/08/monkey-island-1-the-secret-of-mon…
18pfsmt · 2012-10-10
In the comments, someone (from last week) linked to this post:
http://mikeconley.ca/blog/2011/09/07/creating-a-new-thunderbird-addres…
So, it seems like work on a better address book is ongoing.