Volumio UI - Chromium VS Gecko

Volumio Community Forums
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I finally got bits and pieces together and made a boring test video of Volumio’s UI performance on different browsers. I use Volumio since 2019 and have noticed quite huge performance difference based on browser in use - especially big difference in albums list. Based on my experience and now on my experiments, Gecko based browsers does much better job. Of course during recording there is performance penalty introduced by screen recording, still it didn’t influence result that much.

What kind of experience others have? Have others noticed similar performance difference?

2 Likes
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Interesting. Never thought it would have that much impact on the loading and scrolling. I am trying to find a full screen Gecko-based Android browser (without address bar) but no luck yet. So far I tried Tor, Firefox and Ghostery.

Any suggestions?

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I don’t know any. One possibility is to make Your own simple app like I did. Actually this GeckoView based app was 5 line example code, I just hardcoded my Volumio machine IP address.

I didn’t added those extra flags what are needed to remove navigation bar and system notification bar. In current test I didn’t needed full screen app, but I agree that at least navigation bar isn’t necessary for Volumio app. Those flags were meant for game and media player developers, Android user interface design guide don’t recommend these flags for other apps. Currently I’m out of practice, I did last serious coding a year ago.

I imagine that for those, who has 3k+ albums, this performance issue may be very annoying.

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Thanks for suggestion! I don’t have any experience with hard conding whatsoever, but it’s worth a try if it’s only 5 lines. Maybe you still have the text file?

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Yes, I still have it, but it is useless in this form. These five lines are bare minimum to get GeckoView working inside Android app. It is actually example code from here: Getting Started with GeckoView — Firefox Source Docs documentation

My bad, it is actually more than five lines. To get something more useful out of it, some more work is needed to set up full-screen stuff. IP-address setting is also needed unless You really want to hardcode Your Volumio box IP and recompile app every time when IP address changes. I used this code because I wanted to do one time test. In future I may develop it a bit further, but not at this time.