Background:
I'm running KM 1.6.0 beta 2 on Windows 7 x64. Due to the wonderful world of wireless internet, I didn't have internet access all summer. I uninstalled KM. Once I got my internet back, I reinstalled KM (I keep my installers) and did a bunch of Windows updates.

Issue:
Now I'm noticing that KM is kind of unresponsive, and it wasn't that way before as far as I know. Often, when I click on a menu (like Bookmarks or the right-click menu) and click on an item, KM just doesn't register the click. It waits as if I did nothing. I know it's not the mouse - this only happens in KM. If I open a menu and wait a moment or two then click, it'll work fine.

I have no idea when this behavior started as I've only gradually become aware of it. (The first number of times just get forgotten and written of as slightly odd.) Has anyone else experienced this behavior? A search of the forum hasn't turned up anything about it.

I have had same problem on both XP and Win 7 32 bit. I found that a very fast click with mouse sometimes did not get things moving right away. I began to do my clicks a little slower and that fixed it most of the time. Instead of a (tap) click I would do a (push - release) click. Not a much longer click because that gets into some other actions.

Hanlon’s razor is an eponymous adage named after Robert J. Hanlon that states: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

JamesD

Forgot to say before - this isn't confined to the mouse. It affects the keyboard too. If I quickly type Ctrl+G (to do a Google search), type in a string, and hit Enter before much time has passed, Windows plays its Default Beep noise and doesn't search. The search box would still be open, so I just wait a second and then press Enter. It's very annoying...

I have the same issue. I'm running K-Meleon 1.6.0 b2 under Win7, but had had the same bit of experience with beta1, too. I use the address bar a lot to enter search engine query strings, but I've found that Ctrl-G only registers after repeatedly doing the maneuver 3-n times. It doesn't happen only with Ctrl-G apparently. Same goes for other keys like Ctrl-T, Ctrl-W, et al. I thought it may have had been a macro engine, but apparently others are getting it too.

I switched to kmeleon as my primary workhorse browser because of its small memory footprint and stability + addt'l gui niceties (as per beta2), and I'd love to see this keyboard bug resolved

First:
some unresponsibility of GUI (user interface) is the native feature of Gecko engine.
However, it can be minimized by tweaking KM preferences

1. Close KM
2. Find your profile folder and open prefs.js from there
3. find the next strings and set their values as shown below:
   

     
    user_pref("content.interrupt.parsing", true); 
    user_pref("content.max.tokenizing.time", 450000); 
    user_pref("content.maxtextrun", 2048); 
    user_pref("content.notify.backoffcount", 10); 
    user_pref("content.notify.interval", 150000); 
    user_pref("content.notify.ontimer", true); 
    user_pref("content.switch.threshold", 300000); 
    

4. if they are not present there - just copy the peace of code above somewhere in prefs file
5. save and close prefs.js - and run KM

You'll see notable shortening of time when KM's GUI is not responding on mouse input.

You can edit numbers to find optimal values, but it's recommended to read about these settings in Mozillazine Knowledge Base to understand what you do.
content.max.tokenizing.time is recommended to be the multiple of content.notify.interval

content.notify.backoffcount may be changed in wide range from 5 to 30 and more, but remember: decreasing this value fastens GUI response speed but increases the time of page rendering - choose your optimal balance by trial and error method.

NB! You can take CommMeleon from my signature - it's already optimized this way. And more optimizations are made there.

Second:
you don't need to Ctrl+G for fast Google search.

Just go to
Preferences -> Browsing -> Finding Websites

Toggle off Domain Autocompletion
Toggle on Keyword Autosearch and choose Google as 'Search Engine'

Now you can open new tab and write something in urlbar - then press Enter. Wuala!

Third:
the lack of keyboard reaction isn't defeated by me till now. So I only can join you in finding out why KM frequently needs 2 or more pressing of hotkeys to have them working.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 05/27/2012 12:53PM by rodocop.

@ rodocop

Many thanks for the research. I have added the user prefs and will observe to see any change in my KM 1.6.0 beta 2.4 on win 7 (32 bit).

Hanlon’s razor is an eponymous adage named after Robert J. Hanlon that states: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

JamesD

nglayout.initialpaint.delay Synchronize with content.notify.interval for best performance.

I see no reason to do this, km2.
AFAIK, nglayout.initialpaint.delay is connected with small waiting time at start of rendering and must be set to possible minimum in case of KM.

I have set it to 0.

UPD.: I've got deeper in the problem of nglayout.initialpaint.delay and can say that it''s just the question of taste:

• some people like heavy pages to be shown as soon as they are rendered - by small parts added and added continuously - they should set this setting to minimal values.

• other people like to have much of page been rendered previous to first painting - they can tweak the value up to 1000 (milliseconds = 1 sec).

On the FF forums they say that initial delay makes rest of heavy pages to render faster, but I can't perceive it really. Obviously, an effect depends on hardware specs and network connection speed, so optimal values would be different for every PC.

The FF default is 250.
But we must add this parameter as it isn't present by default.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 05/29/2012 07:36AM by rodocop.

But I really don't understand why KM is so uncertainly reacting on keyboard hotkeys input.

As I remember this wasn't a problem till 1.6 branch. Something had gone wrong?

IMPORTANT!

It seems like I've found the reason of keyboard unresponsibility, and - a shame for me - one part of this follows from my own recommendations ¬_¬

So now I give you corrected settings.

 user_pref("content.interrupt.parsing", true); 
 user_pref("content.max.tokenizing.time", 600000); 
 user_pref("content.maxtextrun", 2048); 
 user_pref("content.notify.backoffcount", 10); 
 user_pref("content.notify.interval", 120000); 
 user_pref("content.notify.ontimer", true); 
 user_pref("content.switch.threshold", 900000); 

The last one is the key. When I've reduced it to 300000 (0.3 sec) KM simply started to get into low frequent interruption mode (unresponsive while parsing pages) too quickly, so the time between pressing first and second button in hotkey combinations (like Ctrl + F4, for example) became generally bigger than this interval (0.3 sec).

So, I recommend to increase it up to 900000 (0.9 sec) or slightly more - and key response gets back!

And one more clarification about settings:

user_pref("javascript.options.jit.chrome", false);
user_pref("javascript.options.jit.content", true);

Both are default settings (if they exist in your config) and you should check these are set so.

jit settings are controlling TraceMonkey - js-engine, appeared in FF 3.x.
jit.chrome option controls using this engine in GUI rendering.
jit.content - in content rendering respectively.

KM doesn't use slow XUL GUI of FF, so this option (jit.chrome) must be set at false.
I think, this also speeds up UI response.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/20/2012 08:22PM by rodocop.

I did what you told me and it still isn't perfect, but it is much, much better than before ...

Btw, I do not have these two in my config file ...
user_pref("javascript.options.jit.chrome", false);
user_pref("javascript.options.jit.content", true);

... but if I enter them, save the file and then restart Km, they are gone from the file ...

Yes, KM still freezes from using hotkeys while heavy js are running on a page. This seems to be Gecko's feature.

And what file did you mean - prefs.js?

Yes.

try to add them into default kmprefs.js or create them inside loaded KM through about:config.