Which Orca version is this about exactly? 
3.1.x was an unstable development version...

(In reply to comment #1)
> Which Orca version is this about exactly? 
> 3.1.x was an unstable development version...

I'm running Orca 3.1.9-xdesktop, but I would think this would help the performance in all versions where people are complaining about the Orca/Firefox performance. Given some time, I can experiment with Orca 3.2.1.

Performance with Orca + Firefox/Gecko is improving, and personally I think the thing to do is continue addressing that rather than change the default setting.

(In reply to comment #3)
> Performance with Orca + Firefox/Gecko is improving, and personally I think the
> thing to do is continue addressing that rather than change the default setting.

I agree the performance issue should continue to be addressed. However, if changing this default behaviour improves the performance of Orca/Firefox then I think it should be used as a temporary work around. Many people are being turned off to Orca and Linux because of the performance issues with Firefox, and if this mitigates that to some degree then I think it should be pursued. To be honest, I never even knew this setting was on by default since I never had the patience to wait until the page had been loaded and Orca started to read the page.

I'd be curious to know how many people even prefer this default behaviour, given how many web sites have information at the top of every page you just want to skip over. Maybe I should check, does Orca have a setting to start reading at the body of the web page and skip the headers and static information at the top?

The Thunderbird settings has this behaviour turned off by default, and I've taken to turning it on in Thunderbird since Thunderbird doesn't suffer from the same performance problems, and it starts reading right from the top of the body of the message. I think that default behaviour should also be addressed. In short, I think the default behaviour of the automatic reading of web pages and email messages should be looked at, both for the short term performance benefits, as well as for the long term usage habits.

That being said, this request isn't that big a deal and shouldn't be considered a high priority issue.

The current versions of Orca + Firefox are much more performant. Users who wish to change the preference have a means to do so already: namely make a one-time change to a one time preference.

Lastly, the orca-xdesktop branch was created back when GNOME 3 was inaccessible so that users could have new Orca features and continue using GNOME 2. Now that GNOME 3 is accessible, the xdesktop branch is obsolete.

Understood. I still think not reading new web pages automatically should be the default behavior for more than just performance reasons, but like you said, I just need to make one configuration change to get this behaviour.