Skeleton UI integrated into the latest Nightly build

Jan 25, 2021 18:43 GMT  ·  By

Firefox continues to be one super-popular browser, and according to third-party market share data, it’s currently the third most popular choice on the desktop after leader Google Chrome and runner-up Microsoft Edge, both based on the Chromium engine.

Mozilla is thus working around the clock on improving the experience with Firefox on the desktop, and a recent addition to the feature lineup of the browser is called skeleton UI.

The company admits that launching Firefox after the operating system boot can sometimes take quite a lot of time, and on average, the process could need no less than 19 seconds to complete.

Because during this whole time users don’t get any visual indicator the browser is loading and some just click the Firefox icon in an attempt to launch it, obviously doing more harm than good, Mozilla has turned to what it calls skeleton UI.

Currently tested in the Nightly build

This is a new feature that is currently tested by users running the latest Nightly build and which provides an indication that the browser is loading. It’s mostly a blank Firefox screen that only shows a basic layout of the browser without any UI elements, essentially in an attempt to give the user feedback and thus know the application is currently loading.

“This is a feature which allows us to create the first window and populate it with a non-interactive placeholder UI before we load xul.dll. On some systems, this can mean we can give visual indication of Firefox launching as much as 15 seconds sooner than normal (loading xul.dll can take a while). We're hoping this could be a big win for users who experience very slow startups, and we also hope it will improve the overall snappiness of startup even on fast systems,” Mozilla developer Doug Thayer explains in a recent post spotted by TechDows.

As said, the feature is currently in the Nightly channel, and it’s expected to become available for all users later this year.