Over the last few months, I’ve been talking about all of the work we put into making Australis feel fast when it shipped in Firefox 29.

I talked about where we started with our performance work, and how we grappled with the ts_paint and tpaint performance (“talos”) tests. After that, I talked a bit about the excellent tools we have (and ones we developed ourselves) to make finding our performance bottlenecks easier.

After a brief delay, I rounded out the series by talking about our tab animation performance work, and the customization transition performance work.

I think over the course of working on these things, I’ve learned quite a bit about performance work in general. If I had to distill it down to a few tidbits, it’d be:

• Measure first to get a baseline, then try to improve. (Alternatively, “you can’t improve what you can’t measure”)
• Finding the solutions to performance problems is usually the easy part. The hard part is finding and isolating the problems to begin with.
• While performance work can be a bit of a grind, users do feel and appreciate the efforts. It’s totally worth it.

So that’s it on the series. Enjoy your zippy Firefox!

http://mikeconley.ca/blog/2014/06/28/australis-performance-post-mortem-summary/