3 ms·

I truly appreciate how much time and effort Mozilla puts into Firefox privacy. I do wish however that some more effort was spent on stability and performance. I

by mrmondo 11y ago

I truly appreciate how much time and effort Mozilla puts into Firefox privacy. I do wish however that some more effort was spent on stability and performance. It seems like every day I hear coworkers growling that Firefox has crashed on them and while I'm sure that plugins are a huge part of this it's not exactly easy for the end user to pinpoint where the issue is occurring.

mmastrac 11y ago
I'm anxiously awaiting the landing of https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis for years. That will be a major component of any improvement.
- mconley 11y ago
  Electrolysis ("e10s") has been enabled by default on the Nightly and Developer Edition* channels, if you'd like to help test it. * Although we're currently running an A/B test to measure performance differences with e10s enabled and disabled, so you might fall into the disabled cohort when you run Dev Edition. This experiment is scheduled to end in a few days.
  - brbsix 11y ago
    The last time I tried Electrolysis I had issues with plugins. Some of the plugins are fairly essential to me (e.g. NoScript, HTTPS Everywhere) so I wasn't able to use it as a daily driver. The fault for that may rest at the plugin developers, but I wonder if it has been resolved?
    - ronjouch 11y ago
      It's still imperfect; expect some breakage, depending on your addons. I myself faced problems in HighlightAll (fixed in recently-released 1.8), and VimFx (still broken, which leads me to disable e10s for now). Nit: you mean (js-based) addons/extensions, not (binary) plugins.
hackuser 11y ago
It works great for me; my OS crashes much more often (and that's rarely); I'm a heavy user with dozens of extensions installed and often 50-100 or more tabs open. But yours and my general anecdotal experiences aren't useful. There are hundreds of millions of Firefox users; we [EDIT: i.e., you and I] could have great or horrible experiences and they would indicate nothing. Perhaps if we could point to specific bugs our posts would be substantive, though still probably not of much consequence. We need data.
monochromatic 11y ago
98% of my crashes are Flash-related.
- janzer 11y ago
  Yep, I finally uninstalled flash a couple of months ago and will open up a chrome window for the rare website I need that still requires flash.
  - jszymborski 11y ago
    Chrome exists on my comp solely for Netflix and Flash.
XJOKOLAT 11y ago
Weird. Never had a problem my side. One crash a month, tops (heavy usage). I moved to Firefox a while back in futile protest at the big G ... but I've come to truly appreciate it. It's the much better browser. Not sure where Chrome is nowadays but I remember it looked clean, and was like lightning at the beginning. Crapware now (or when I left it). Appreciate these moves. Long live the fox.
mccr8 11y ago
We spend plenty of effort is spent on both stability and performance. "Improved performance by x% in this particular situation that you may or may experience!" just isn't something you can wrap up neatly into a high-level blog post like you can with a new feature, so you may not get an accurate picture of where development effort is going based just on reading the official blog and release notes. For instance, somebody just landed a pretty tricky bit of code to fix a severe incremental GC performance fault he'd been experiencing with a lot of tabs open (disclaimer: I reviewed the patch): https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1214961 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1214961

by mrmondo 11y ago

mmastrac 11y ago

I'm anxiously awaiting the landing of https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis for years. That will be a major component of any improvement.

mconley 11y ago
Electrolysis ("e10s") has been enabled by default on the Nightly and Developer Edition* channels, if you'd like to help test it. * Although we're currently running an A/B test to measure performance differences with e10s enabled and disabled, so you might fall into the disabled cohort when you run Dev Edition. This experiment is scheduled to end in a few days.
- brbsix 11y ago
  The last time I tried Electrolysis I had issues with plugins. Some of the plugins are fairly essential to me (e.g. NoScript, HTTPS Everywhere) so I wasn't able to use it as a daily driver. The fault for that may rest at the plugin developers, but I wonder if it has been resolved?
  - ronjouch 11y ago
    It's still imperfect; expect some breakage, depending on your addons. I myself faced problems in HighlightAll (fixed in recently-released 1.8), and VimFx (still broken, which leads me to disable e10s for now). Nit: you mean (js-based) addons/extensions, not (binary) plugins.

hackuser 11y ago

It works great for me; my OS crashes much more often (and that's rarely); I'm a heavy user with dozens of extensions installed and often 50-100 or more tabs open. But yours and my general anecdotal experiences aren't useful. There are hundreds of millions of Firefox users; we [EDIT: i.e., you and I] could have great or horrible experiences and they would indicate nothing. Perhaps if we could point to specific bugs our posts would be substantive, though still probably not of much consequence. We need data.

monochromatic 11y ago

98% of my crashes are Flash-related.

janzer 11y ago
Yep, I finally uninstalled flash a couple of months ago and will open up a chrome window for the rare website I need that still requires flash.
- jszymborski 11y ago
  Chrome exists on my comp solely for Netflix and Flash.

XJOKOLAT 11y ago

Weird. Never had a problem my side. One crash a month, tops (heavy usage). I moved to Firefox a while back in futile protest at the big G ... but I've come to truly appreciate it. It's the much better browser. Not sure where Chrome is nowadays but I remember it looked clean, and was like lightning at the beginning. Crapware now (or when I left it). Appreciate these moves. Long live the fox.

mccr8 11y ago

We spend plenty of effort is spent on both stability and performance. "Improved performance by x% in this particular situation that you may or may experience!" just isn't something you can wrap up neatly into a high-level blog post like you can with a new feature, so you may not get an accurate picture of where development effort is going based just on reading the official blog and release notes. For instance, somebody just landed a pretty tricky bit of code to fix a severe incremental GC performance fault he'd been experiencing with a lot of tabs open (disclaimer: I reviewed the patch): https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1214961 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1214961