Skeleton UI, New Firefox Interface to Start up Much Faster

Recently, a good number of users have started to complain that Firefox Nightly , the development version of the browser, has taken up to 19 seconds to start up . Firefox takes a long time to display the window as such, several seconds to display the panels and sometimes up to 8 seconds to display the home page. An atrocity.

Although it all depends on the hardware that our computer has, the time it takes to load this browser is too much. And since the human being is impatient, this meant that, although the browser was loading, there were users who double-clicked again and again until they opened the browser. And in the end they ended up with several windows open at the same time.

Thus, to avoid this, Mozilla has created a new user interface, called Skeleton UI , that makes Firefox start faster than ever.

How the new Skeleton UI accelerates the startup of Firefox

Broadly speaking, what Skeleton UI does is show the user a very basic, skeletal interface , as an indication that the browser is running. This interface is like a chassis, on which all the elements of the browser are loaded.

By dividing the load of the interface into several smaller parts, instead of loading it all at once, the browser speeds up its opening noticeably. Especially after having opened it for the first time in the current session.

Mozilla hopes that this feature will reduce the long wait times when opening the browser on older computers. However, a noticeable improvement will also be noticed on more powerful PCs.

At the moment, this new interface is only available for Firefox Nightly users with Windows 10 . If the testing phase is successful, it will gradually reach other versions of the browser until it reaches its stable branch. Mozilla may even bring this feature to other operating systems beyond Windows 10. But for now we will have to wait.

How to enable or disable

Although any performance improvement is always welcome, some users may not want to see the skeletal interface when opening the browser. Or maybe, being in development, we have a problem with it. In that case, Mozilla allows us to disable it very easily from the advanced options of the browser.

To do this, we just have to type in the address bar about: config, promise that we will be careful when modifying the advanced options of the browser, and look for the option ” browser.startup.preXulSkeletonUI “.

If this value is TRUE it means that the SkeletonUI is enabled in the browser. Otherwise, if it is set to FALSE , it will be disabled and Firefox will use normal loading when running.