[HTTPS-Everywhere] Startup time measurements in Chrome and Firefox

[Peter Eckersley]

Particularly in the master branch (ie, Firefox HTTPSE version 4.x), the
10,000 rulesets that we need to parse in from XML are starting to add
problematic amounts of latency to browser load time.  Unfortunately we
can't postpone this work until after the browser has started because we
don't know whether a ruleset is going to be needed immediately to
prevent an insecure outbound HTTP request.

Measured ruleset parsing times on a modern-ish laptop (you can get them in
firefox with the about:config loglevel set to 4 or less, I just added
them to chrome):

Firefox, master branch:

Loading rulesets took 3.903 seconds

Firefox, stable branch:

Loading rulesets took 1.168 seconds

Chrome, master branch (unreleased):

Loading rulesets took 1.755 seconds

Chrome, stable branch:

Loading rulesets took 0.582 seconds

It's suspicious to me that the parser is almost exactly twice as fast in
Chrome as it is in Firefox.  But either way, Mike and I are hacking
today on a way to fix these problematic slowdowns at browser load time.

-- 
Peter Eckersley                            pde at eff.org
Technology Projects Director      Tel  +1 415 436 9333 x131
Electronic Frontier Foundation    Fax  +1 415 436 9993