The foundation Mozilla is currently testing a new feature called "Tab Warming" or on the Greek Heated Tabs. The Greek name may sound funny, but engineers who develop the technology are hoping to improve the tab switching process.
According to a feature description, the upcoming Tab Warming feature will monitor your mouse cursor and begin to "paint" the contents into a tab each time your mouse is over one.
Ο Firefox with this feature it will recognize when the user wants to click to view a tab and try to prepare or preheat it according to Mozilla engineers.
“These precious milliseconds are used for the best upload performance, so when the click event eventually comes, the tab will be ready and waiting for you," said Mike Conley, one of the Firefox engineers working on the feature.
The Tab Warming developed by Mozilla, should not be confused with tab loading or preloading tabs. The tab should already be loaded in the Browser (probably they are directed at me as the open tabs sometimes exceed 100).
The function refers to the "painting," tab, which is the process of displaying the content of a page within a tab.
Conley said that although this feature is being prepared to improve Firefox's experience in switching between already open tabs, which in some cases may display white pages, the actual gain will be a few milliseconds.
"For many cases, I really think the card warm-up will not be very noticeable," Conley said.
"In my experience, we are now able to run most sites fast enough that the difference is negligible."
“However, there are some sites that can't deliver and display their layers quickly. These are the pages that I think will help Tab Warming, Conley said.
The Mozilla engineer was referring to sites that display animations made with CSS and may take some time space to display a working page. The same can happen on pages that display many images that may take time to calculate before displaying.
We'll see this feature in upcoming versions of Firefox, as it is currently experimental and only deployed on Firefox Nightly.
It is also not enabled by default. Those of you who want to try it, except installing Firefox Nightly, should turn it on manually.
This is done by about: config and setting:
"Browser.tabs.remote.warmup.enabled". With a double click, set the value to true and you're done.
To not look for:
About: config? filter = browser.tabs.remote.warmup.enabled
DONE