Firefox

Some quick hacks

userContent & userChrome

• https://github.com/anaclumos/firefox

Make Browser Tab Bar More Compact

• about:config
• browser.uidensity: 0 is the default, 1 is compact, 2 is touch (sparser)

Improving Firefox responsiveness on macOS - Mozilla Hacks - the Web developer blog

• This improvement was achieved via a slight change in how locking is implemented within Firefox's memory allocator.
• Putting a thread to sleep has significant performance implications and, thus, is not always the best option.
• it might be advantageous to let a thread spin briefly if the lock it's trying to acquire is only held briefly.
• It can result in higher performance and lower power consumption, as spinning costs less than sleeping.
• As you might have guessed by now, OSSpinLock offered excellent performance on a lightly loaded system but behaved poorly as the load ramped up.
• This problem with OSSpinLock was known within Apple hence its deprecation
• Enter osunfairlock, Apple's official replacement for OSSpinLock. If you still use OSSpinLock, you'll get explicit warnings to use it instead
• So I used it, but the results were terrible. Performance in some of our automated tests degraded by as much as 30%.
• As it turns out, osunfairlock doesn't spin on contention; it makes the calling thread sleep right away when it finds a contended lock
• The function is osunfairlockwithoptions() and the options I used are OSUNFAIRLOCKDATASYNCHRONIZATION and OSUNFAIRLOCKADAPTIVESPIN
• The latter asks the kernel to use kernel-space adaptive spinning, and the former prevents it from spawning additional threads in the thread pools used by Apple's libraries
• Did they work? Yes! Performance on lightly loaded systems was about the same as OSSpinLock, but on loaded ones, they provided massively better responsiveness
• I initially fell back to OSSpinLock as an intermediate solution on older systems. Later I managed to get rid of it for good by relying on osunfairlock plus manual spinning in user space