I'm attaching a screencast from the quantum reference hardware. When I focus the awesomebar, the following happens: 1. 12 frames with a black bottom border of the awesomebar panel, but the rest of the panel remaining transparent. 2. The panel becomes white, and remains white for 33 frames (that's ~520ms) 3. The glass icon appears with an animation lasting 15 frames. 4. The 'Nightly' word starts appearing with another animation 5. The yellow tip area appears with another animation 6. The Change Options link appears with yet another animation. Steps 1 and 2 feel too slow here, the UI seemed broken to me initially (I see no reason for this empty panel to appear and distract my attention away from what I'm typing). I'm not sure step 1 is intentional, it may be a bug. Step 2 is a 500ms delay in the animation code at http://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/d840ebd5858a61dbc1622487c1fab74ecf235e03/browser/themes/shared/urlbarSearchSuggestionsNotification.inc.css#125 I think this value could be significantly reduced. Probably to 100 or 200ms (depending on how much we can reduce the length of step 1). Not directly related to performance/speed: I find the colorful glass icon confusing; especially when the 'real' icon is also displayed on the same line.

(In reply to Florian Quèze [:florian] [:flo] from comment #0) > Not directly related to performance/speed: I find the colorful glass icon > confusing; especially when the 'real' icon is also displayed on the same > line. As I said on IRC, I can't fix that without a huge effort, because this is a mixture of HTML and XUL, plus l10n, a11y and RTL/LTR. I tried to use the magnifier xul image, but gave up after wasted hours.

Fixing the delay here would be trivial and would probably help the feeling of responsiveness a lot already, so tentatively marking p2. Feel free to reduce priority if you disagree.