Mozilla has been doing a lot of work to improve the rendering performance and power usage of Firefox. I tested the latest version on a project with ~1300 blocks and drag performance was much smoother on Firefox than on Chrome. I’m curious if others are seeing benefits in App Inventor as well.
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I do most of my work on my phone so I just installed Firefox 68.2.0. It does run a bit more smoothly than Chrome.
Thanks for posting!
Absolutely! When I have a project with more than 1500 blocks, I have to use Firefox or it becomes almost impossible to do anything.
I started collapsing all the events and procedures. It helps a lot but it takes time to get adapted to it, after being used to see all the blocks and logic at a glance.
Any plans on improving the rendering?
Based on my findings, on desktop, Firefox uses much less memory than Chrome.
Memory Usage (in MB)
| Firefox | Chrome (JS) | Chrome (Total) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Designer | 55 | 96 | 235 |
| Blocks editor | 98 | 120 | 345 |
Note: The readings are not accurate and are taken from the browser’s Task Manager.
We actually already have done quite a bit on top of what Blockly has, performance-wise. I gave a talk on some of our performance work at Google last month (slides). With our optimizations turned off, we see anywhere from 2-4x slowdown on large projects. Unfortunately they haven’t posted the recording of the talk yet.
Edit: The talks are available
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(added to new AppInventor Performance section of FAQ)
https://sites.google.com/view/ai2-faq-view/home
For me, Blocks Editor freezes when loading blocks from backpack. Only solution to reload AI2 site. Also, mouse wheel scrolling of blocks editor very very slow (this could be a firefox setting I haven’t found yet!)
I am also seeing a blocks editor freeze when pulling blocks from the palette. A trip to the Designer and back resolved that.
70.0.1 (64-bit)
Do you see the same issues on ai2-test? There were some issues I fixed that aren't yet in production but are on the test server.
ai2-test version fixes items 1 and 3, but no change to mouse wheel scrolling, even after changing settings in Firefox (which work on “normal” web pages)