Back in the fall of 2011, we took a targeted look at Firefox responsiveness issues. We identified a number of short term projects that together could achieve significant responsiveness improvements in day-to-day Firefox usage. Project Snappy kicked off at the end of the year with the goal of improving Firefox responsiveness.
Although Snappy first contributed fixes to Firefox 11, Snappy’s most noticeable contributions to date are landing with Firefox 13. Currently in beta, this release includes a number of responsiveness related fixes, most notably tabs-on-demand, cycle collector improvements, and start-up optimization.