Another week full of performance related updates quickly went by, I'd like to share a few of them. We're almost mid-April, about 3 weeks after I shared my first update on our progress battling our sync IPC issues. I have prepared a second Sync IPC Report for 2017-04-13. For those who looked at the previous report, this is in the same spreadsheet, and the data is next to the previous report, for easy comparison.

As promised (with a day of delay), here is an update on what happened in the last two weeks on making Firefox faster as part of the Quantum Flow project. Last week we had a big work week at the Mozilla Toronto office. Many members of the various teams were attending and the week was packed with a lot of planning around the performance issues that have been identified in each area so far, and what we are planning to do in each area for Firefox 57 and beyond.

Another week, another Quantum Flow engineering newsletter! We have a lot to cover, so let me get started. Nika Layzell is getting really close on her work on bug 1346415 in order to collect native stacks from Background Hang Reports through telemetry on Nightly. There are several practical concerns around this data collection, things such as not blowing up our telemetry ping size, and also the processing of this data on the server side, and we have some ideas on how we can improve this in the future.

This past week was another busy week chasing down performance issues in Firefox. We managed to knock out a few issues, get closer to close out a couple of really high impact ones, and are making good progress on starting to get performance data from telemetry which will hopefully allow us to prioritize our efforts in a systematic way in order to focus on issues that hurt our users the most in the wild first.

A while ago a number of engineers including myself started to look into a performance project that turned into Quantum Flow. The focus of the project is finding and prioritising the issues across the entire browser so we will need help from many of you to get them fixed. I’m planning to write regular updates about the project and highlight the focus areas and the ongoing work. In this first email I’m going to start by giving some background about how we started and where we are now.

First things first, this post reflects my personal viewpoints and not that of my employer. With that boilerplate out of the way, I want to talk about what’s happening in the US and how it’s going to affect me. What happened? Let me start by giving you a bit of background about myself that may help explain some of my viewpoints. I was born in Iran. As a result, I was banned from entering the US for 90 days starting this past Friday.