15 ms·

Firefox 48 Beta, Release, and E10S

242 points by davezatch 10y ago

zxcvcxz 10y ago
>Splitting UI from content means that when a web page is devouring your computer’s processor, your tabs and buttons and menus won’t lock up too. Finally. Every browser I use does this when I load a huge reddit thread while RES in enabled.
gear54rus 10y ago
People blame chrome for being memory hog and it's probably exactly for this reason. I fully expect mem usage to go up for E10S release as well... As a daily FF user both at work and at home, I'm not sure if that's a good thing.
- oblio 10y ago
  Isn't Chrome multi-process per-tab? Unless I'm misunderstanding, Firefox's e10s will create just 2 processes: UI / content.
  - wjoe 10y ago
    I thought the plan was for Firefox to use the same process-per-tab model as Chrome, but this post does seem to imply that it's just 2 - "we’re using project Electrolysis to split Firefox into a UI process and a content process." They also go on to say that "After that, we’ll be working on support for multiple content processes.", so I assume the plan is to have one perocess-per-tab eventually. I'm surprised they aren't there already though, considering this has been in the works for a few years now.
    - keeperofdakeys 10y ago
      There was a period where electrolysis didn't receive much work, and then there was a second push to get it working. That's why it seems to be taking so long. As for process-per-tab, I can't find anything official about it on the bug tracker. The problem with that option is it leads to quite high memory usage, and hides the existence of memory leaks (chrome really likes to eat my ram). We'll have to see how memory usage goes as they experiment with multiple content processes.
    - c0nducktr 10y ago
      It is starting with just two for now, but will be increased after more optimization. There's a setting you can modify in about:config that will allow you to manually set the number of processes if you want to experiment with it. source: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/4hmii4/firefoxs_appeal_has_been_plummeting_according_to/d2r0sad https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/4hmii4/firefoxs_ap...
  - deprave 10y ago
    The goal must be a single controller ("UI") process and multiple content processes for each tab, otherwise they'll be missing out on the advantages of a multiprocess model, namely, stability and isolation. They're first going to do two processes, probably for debugging without too many moving parts, then multiprocess. See https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Schedule_and_Status https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Schedule_and_Status and https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/Multiple_content_processes https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/Multiple_content_proce....
    - piotrjurkiewicz 10y ago
      > The goal must be [...] multiple content processes for each tab According to the wiki page you linked, it doesn't seem to be the goal for them: "The (practically) unlimited process count is on some platforms not a realistic goal, and having a separate process for each open site instances or even sites does not seem like a reachable goal (for now at least). Which means using content processes as a security membrane cannot be a goal either." If this is true, I don't see any advantages of e10s introduction.
      - deprave 10y ago
        They're going to find out that managing processes by themselves is going to be very difficult (similar to M:N threading), and opt for a Chrome-like model where each tab is its own process.
        firethief 10y ago
        That was the original Chrome model but they switched to M:N.
    - sp332 10y ago
      It's not supported, but you can go into about:config and change dom.ipc.processCount to a number higher than one. I haven't had any trouble running at the number of hardware threads, minus one for the UI.
- topaxi 10y ago
  I'm using nightly builds since about two years and can't remember when exactly I enabled E10S. When I enabled it, I noticed around 20mb more memory usage. So imho this is a good thing, not that much memory for a lot more safety and if Firefox crashes for some reasons, all I have to do is clicking the "reload tabs" button.
  - sametmax 10y ago
    So how is it? Does it feel better? Faster ? Slower? Where? When?
    - rangibaby 10y ago
      I've used the developer channel and regular Firefox side by side the entire time and haven't noticed a difference to be honest. One extension I use (rikaichan) froze in e10s, but was fixed.
      - Altenuvian 10y ago
        More performant in my experience - less lag and beachballing. Mac running El Capitan.
    - Sylos 10y ago
      It mostly feels smoother, i.e. less laggy. To me, that's most noticeable when scrolling, which comes from the added implementation of Asynchronous Panning and Zooming (APZ). Basically, beforehand when you turned your scroll wheel, Firefox first sent a scroll event to the webpage, then the webpage could execute whatever it needed to execute on scroll, and then Firefox actually scrolled the page. With APZ, that's now handled in parallel, i.e. it already scrolls what's there and alters it at the same time with whatever the webpage wants to do on scroll. This also applies for zooming the page, as you might have guessed from the name, and as far as I can tell also to resizing the window. Other than that, all animations in the browser UI are a lot smoother, too. For example, I can now just hold down Ctrl+T (which opens new tabs) and it happily chugs through playing the tab-animation hundreds of times with seemingly the only limiting factor being my screen's refresh rate. (And that's on a below-average laptop.)
- wjoe 10y ago
  Most people still claim Firefox is a memory hog, but from my observations Chrome uses a lot more from it's one process-per-tab model compared to Firefox's single process for many tabs. It might not be significant for a small number of tabs, but as someone who frequently has 50 tabs open (I know, I have a problem), I'm concerned at how much this could increase things. That said, memory usage isn't my biggest concern, I generally have no shortage of memory, and don't particularly care if my browser is using 1GB of RAM. If this improves stability and performance (which seems to have gotten much worse recently on OS X in particular), then it's a fair trade off.
  - farresito 10y ago
    I'm not sure if Chrome has an option to disable it, but the thing I dislike the most about Chrome is when you open a past session and it reloads every. single. tab. Firefox is smart: it only reloads the page when you click it. This saves plenty of memory, but Chrome... oh boy.
  - hacker42 10y ago
    This is a related bug report: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1125557 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1125557
  - snuxoll 10y ago
    > but as someone who frequently has 50 tabs open (I know, I have a problem) How do people get work done WITHOUT having 50 tabs open? It's a pretty regular occurrence for me, between having MSDN, the PostgreSQL handbook, documentation for a half dozen libraries, my "read later" list, etc., there's almost never a day I am not drowning in tabs. Thankfully, the Tree-Style Tabs extension saves the day here!
    - gear54rus 10y ago
      I don't know why people do that. Having 50 of them open does not increase your brain processing capacity, you probably still work with like 10 at maximum. My day typically consists of 6-7 pinned ones and 10 tops dynamic. As a rule, if the tabs reach the end of 1920x1080 screen, it's time to close something :) No tree-style required.
- farresito 10y ago
  At least Chrome is relatively fast. The only reason I use Firefox is because of a couple of plugins, but otherwise I would dump Firefox and switch to something else (and the plugins barely affect the speed). I really don't know what has been happening to Firefox in the past few months/couple of years, but that's not the browser I remember.
  - acdha 10y ago
    Try disabling all of your extensions or using the “Refresh Firefox” command in about:support. These days I rarely notice a difference between the two except on extremely JavaScript-heavy sites – things like asm.js demos, not Gmail – when E10S isn't enabled and so the UI blocks.
    - whyagaindavid 10y ago
      Try about:config Change your browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers = 5 It is a breeze. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.sessionhistory.max_total_v...
- TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
  Process isolation for tabs could reduce the impact of memory leaks though, right?
  - velodrome 10y ago
    Probably not. I have had Chrome tabs go to 10GB of RAM before.
- mtgx 10y ago
  RAM is cheap. Getting hacked isn't (especially when you consider ransomware these days). That's the reason Chrome is the most secure browser around, and Firefox isn't even invited to Pwn2Own anymore. https://it.slashdot.org/story/16/02/12/034206/pwn2own-2016-wont-attack-firefox-because-its-too-easy https://it.slashdot.org/story/16/02/12/034206/pwn2own-2016-w...
  - kuschku 10y ago
    Great, so we have no open browser left anymore? Chrome is at best visible source – Google controls development, not the community – and the others are even fully proprietary Great fucking world.
    - Ichaitei 10y ago
      How about making Firefox more secure (one of the goals of E10s)?
      - kuschku 10y ago
        That can only be done if Firefox has users. Which is hard to do when Google competes unfairly, even illegally – which they did, for example with using AdSense for Chrome ads everywhere, and not paying website owners where the ads were displayed the normal rates, or by adding fraudulent banners "Your browser (Firefox) is outdated, upgrade to Chrome now" to Google Search.
        kebolio 10y ago
        Can someone answer why this is wrong instead of just downvoting?
        Sylos 10y ago
        Well, it's wrong, because it can not only be done, if Firefox has users. You don't need to care what 99% of the world population is doing. As long as Firefox exists, you can use it. You could say that without many users, there won't enough real-world exposure, but at the same time, Firefox will also be targeted far less, so you wouldn't have to worry about security vulnerabilities as much. And while yes, if at some point Chrome becomes Internet Explorer 2.0 and webpages target nothing else anymore, that could cause Firefox to be hardly usable, but that's then an entirely different nightmare and not anymore relevant to the current situation.
- isaacaggrey 10y ago
  Memory usage is closely being watched as part of the 10s transition. Of course, e10s is not a free lunch, but according to early claims [1] it's 20% more than non-e10s Firefox and half the usage of Chrome's multi-process implementation. [1]: http://www.erahm.org/2016/02/12/are-they-slim-yet/ http://www.erahm.org/2016/02/12/are-they-slim-yet/
sonnyp 10y ago
There are interesting data and comparisons without E10S on https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/Release_Criteria https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/Release_Criteria and http://www.erahm.org/2016/02/11/memory-usage-of-firefox-with-e10s-enabled/ http://www.erahm.org/2016/02/11/memory-usage-of-firefox-with...
sumanthvepa 10y ago
Wonder what happens when the ui process crashes with the backend process still running? Or vice versa? It seems like killing Firefox just became a whole lot more difficult.
- zxcvcxz 10y ago
  I imagine it will still be straight forward on Linux/Unix.
- gear54rus 10y ago
  It's very likely that OS-level facilities will be used to interlock those processes in such a way that no tabs can exist without the UI to attach to... It seems fairly obvious that this scenario should be handled in some way. You probably won't have to kill anything new.
- kristofferR 10y ago
  I just tried - the "Firefox Web Content" process was automatically killed quickly after the "Firefox" process was killed. No surprise there, it would be weird if they hadn't considered that scenario. If the "Web Content" process is killed while the main Firefox process is running, Firefox asks if you want to restore the tabs - which is half the point of e10s. "killall firefox" would be easy to do anyway.
morsch 10y ago
Notably, it'll remain disabled by default if you're using extensions (pretty much everybody here who is running Firefox?): The groups that will have to wait a bit for E10S account for about half of our release users and include Windows XP users, users with screen readers, RTL users, and the largest group, extension users. You can manually enable it, though[0]: However, if you want to permanently opt-in, you can do so with a simple pref change. Just go to about:config and toggle browser.tabs.remote.autostart to true. On your next restart, e10s should be active. To verify that it is active, go to about:support and look for a number higher than 0 in "Multiprocess Windows". I didn't realize they had this kind of fine-grained control over A/B-testing in their Firefox beta population, as Asa puts it: We have all the knobs. I understand where they are coming from, but it feels a bit weird to have a piece of software running on my computer checking in with a remote server to enable/disable functionality. [0] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis
- wjoe 10y ago
  Any reason why it won't be enabled for people using extensions? This makes me worry that there's some significant incompatibility with extensions, and that when they do enable it for everyone, it'll break some of the extensions I use. I suspect that splitting the UI and content into multiple processes would make certain things very difficult.
  - crc32 10y ago
    Extensions that access stuff that "lives" in the content process can be rewritten or shimmed; but this hasn't been finished yet for all extensions. There's a list of extension status here: https://www.arewee10syet.com/ https://www.arewee10syet.com/
  - thristian 10y ago
    It is exactly that. Some extensions (it used to be "many extensions" before E10S was enabled on the Nightly and Aurora channels) assume that they can call back and forth between page content and browser chrome, which is easy when they're all JS objects in the same memory space, but which doesn't work nearly as well between processes. It might be worth downloading Firefox Developer Edition (which uses a separate profile) and installing your usual suite of extensions to check they all still work. The only extension I personally know is weird under E10S is "It's All Text", where the edit button doesn't appear on textareas until you switch to a different tab and back. Other extensions like uBlock Origin, Tree Style Tabs, Open In Browser, HTTPS Everywhere, Document Font Toggle all work fine.
fauigerzigerk 10y ago
I'm trying Firefox about once a year because I want to like it for being independent and privacy minded. But every time I find myself going back to other browsers for seemingly minor reasons. The most important one is that firefox opens new windows a few hundered milliseconds too slowly (on Mac OS X). Just a little bit too slowly for me to just hit Cmd+N and blindly start typing a url. I have to stop and pay attention to when the window is ready, hundereds of times a day. Another annoyance, a much less important one, is that Firefox wastes a lot of screen real estate at the top.
- joelthelion 10y ago
  You open new windows hundreds of times a day?
  - fauigerzigerk 10y ago
    Yes
    - joelthelion 10y ago
      Can you explain why? I'm genuinely curious.
      - lloeki 10y ago
        Windows as tab groups. Some of those are quite persistent, but many are very transient and don't live longer than a dozen minutes. There are OSes with potent window managers. Ideally tabs should even be part of the WM itself† and not be reinvented across each app††, or disappear altogether (e.g Chrome on Android, Exposé/Mission Control per app window grouping) † possibly even allowing tabs to be a mix of apps †† features such as pinned tabs, the defunct Firefox tab groups/overview, Vivaldi are especially egregious examples.
      - fauigerzigerk 10y ago
        The primary reason is that I search for everything instead of navigating to it on individual websites. That includes function signatures and other API stuff I need all day long. And I don't keep windows or tabs open because they are hard to find again and start to pile up. So I open and close them a lot. I don't use the bookmarks menu directly. I just open a new window and start typing. Either the page I'm looking for is in the auto complete or I hit enter and it goes to the search engine. To sum it up, I have trouble remembering hierarchies and various navigation and UX ideas that web designers come up with. I have trouble visually grasping what's on a page (it's a kind of disability I always had). So instead I search. In fact, that's also one of the great things about Firefox. Typing in its location bar lets me find other open windows and tabs. I love that.
darklajid 10y ago
Is E10S going to replace the current model? I mean - is the plan to drop the choice when E10S is stable/works for all known scenarios? I'm asking because I might have a bit of a problem with my tab addiction (my phone regularly reaches 60+, my laptop or desktop probable sit around 2-3 times that for weeks at a time) and I don't think that'll translate well into a process-per-tab model. Yes, I know about bookmarks, read-later tools and that this isn't the healthiest habit.
- sp332 10y ago
  FF doesn't use process per tab. It will use one process for chrome and one for all the content rendering for all tabs.
  - dkns 10y ago
    It will in the future from what I understand. You can enable it right now in nightly.
    - sp332 10y ago
      You can set a certain max number of processes. I don't think there's a way to explicitly do process-per-tab or process-per-domain.
      - johnp_ 10y ago
        There isn't. It is planned to add an algorithm for grouping tabs into processes and dynamically adding/removing content processes, but that's low priority right now, because the current focus lies on getting the single content process e10s ready for the release channel. More info in the e10s-multi bug and its dependencies: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/showdependencytree.cgi?id=e10s-multi&hide_resolved=1 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/showdependencytree.cgi?id=e10s-... (also a nice way to look for known issues that might affect you if you're interested in trying out e10s-multi)
  - ascagnel_ 10y ago
piotrjurkiewicz 10y ago
> Splitting UI from content means that when a web page is devouring your computer’s processor, your tabs and buttons and menus won’t lock up too. Well, for that particular problem, there is a much simpler solution than splitting application into two distinct processes. It's called multithreading. Moving UI into a separate thread would not only be simpler than moving it into a separate process, but also wouldn't result in 20-50% memory usage growth.
- deprave 10y ago
  That's what they're doing now and it's the problem, not the solution. Multiple threads run in the same process address space. This creates security and stability issues. One website can affect the complete experience. That's exactly the problem they're trying to solve, the same way Chrome did, by using multiple processes. That way, for example, when one process misbehaves and gobbles up too much memory, the OS won't kill the entire browser but just the offending tab. (The OS won't kill individual threads.)
  - the8472 10y ago
    > security and stability That's shifting goalposts. GP quoted that it's about responsiveness and resource consumption. And resource consumption is obviously lower with multi-threading since more data structures can be shared.
    - deprave 10y ago
      That's not shifting goalposts, that's the goal from the start. You seem to be throwing a lot of technical terms. Could you elaborate on where exactly do you see overhead coming from in a multiprocess vs. multithread architecture? And which data structures can be shared between threads but not between processes? Scheduling overhead is identical and pure OS memory overhead is slightly higher for processes (they need more "accounting" data), but everything else can be optimized at the application level. Furthermore, shared memory lets you share data structures between processes just fine (heck, some data can be shared between processes and the kernel!), and since I assume the content processes will be dynamically linked, you're not even going to load shared libraries multiple times.
sp332 10y ago
Could someone running e10s load up newegg.com and see if it freezes the browser for about 30 seconds? Separating processes is supposed to mean that chrome stays responsive, but that hasn't been my experience with it.
- nprescott 10y ago
  Loaded 2,875KB over 107 requests in 168 seconds and no visible freezing on newegg.com with e10s enabled.
  - sp332 10y ago
    So just me then :( I've tried it on two machines, with and without extensions installed. On my poor laptop it locked up for over a minute.
    - epmatsw 10y ago
      R/Firefox is doing a performance AMA today, asking/helping people to run a profiler extension while hitting flows that cause sluggishness. You should stop by and see if they can help you out and get a bug report started.
  - satysin 10y ago
    > 168 seconds wtf?! It loads fully loads in around 4 seconds for me (Chrome stable x64, Windows 10)
    - nprescott 10y ago
      The load time has nothing to do with Firefox or my operating system, it's a direct effect of bandwidth (mine is obviously limited). It's a content-heavy page with a huge number of requests.
      - scholia 10y ago
        Loads here in Firefox (not e10s, with about 100 tabs) in 2.962 seconds -- 232K loaded, with 70 images. No delays or freezes. I'm also running uBlock Origin and Ghostery, which is blocking 7 trackers....
mp3geek 10y ago
The main issue I find with E10s (nightly user here), is on some heavy sites which requires firefox to load on a specific tab, will often get the dreaded "swirl arrow reload" animation on other open tabs until the site is loaded.
- whoisthemachine 10y ago
  FWIW, I use multiple processes (the number of cores * 2 + 1, it's a magical number I grabbed from somewhere), and get that far less frequently.
  - wldcordeiro 10y ago
    Is that number of physical cores? Or would you use 8 with an i7?
    - whoisthemachine 10y ago
      I guess I use full number of logical cores
mtgx 10y ago
Sounds like even though it's been delayed for years, Electrolysis is still not anywhere close to being ready for prime time. And it's not even a full process sandbox. How many more years are we going to wait for that?
izzle49 10y ago
Tried it, still not as responsive as chrome
- sammoth 10y ago
  In what way?
  - izzle49 10y ago
    hangs on js intensive pages, like jira
whoisthemachine 10y ago
Congrats!
ritonlajoie 10y ago
Since a couple of years I can't use firefox anymore with the usual must have privacy extensions. It's super slow and laggy compared to chrome ;( I wish I would use firefox but I can't see it freeze completely everytime I click on a link.
- scholia 10y ago
  Firefox got to be much better a couple of years ago. In my experience, it's generally equal to or better than Chrome.
danilocesar 10y ago
That sounds awesome!!! 7-years-late awesome, but still great news!
hacker42 10y ago
I am still patiently waiting until unloaded tabs have a memory footprint of 0KB instead of 0.7MB.
- epmatsw 10y ago
  Serious question, why does that matter? If you've got a thousand tabs open, that's 700mb, or roughly 4% of your (probably) 16gb of memory. Why worry?
  - hacker42 10y ago
    I have a pretty old machine without memory upgrade options. Of course, it would not be an issue on a machine with 16 GB. I've been following the bugs with tab-related memory and perf issues for quite a while, but maybe you are right that Moore's Law fixed them by now and I should upgrade.
bobsgame 10y ago
This is great. I've been using Firefox since Phoenix and it only continues getting better!
airnomad 10y ago
My biggest issue with FF is Firebug - it just can't compete with Chrome dev tools. On the other hand, FF has one huge advantage - Pentadactyl.
- mintplant 10y ago
  Firebug or the Firefox Developer Tools? The built-in DevTools have been pretty great for a while now.
- jobigoud 10y ago
  Does Firebug has anything over the built-in FF dev tools at this point?
  - johnp_ 10y ago
    The built-in dev tools have improved drastically in the latest versions of Firefox and that's also why [Firebug.next](https://getfirebug.com/downloads https://getfirebug.com/downloads) (aka Firebug 3) isn't a standalone panel any more, but is integrated with and built upon the native dev tools.
- baby 10y ago
  I haven't used Firebug in decades, the native tools are more than enough (and way better presented than Chrome imo). If it's not enough there is Firefox Developer Edition[1]. But not talking about development. How can you use a browser that does not allow for tabs to be displayed on the side? Tree Style Tab[2] on Firefox makes it the best browser for me. [1]: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/ [2]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
DavidWanjiru 10y ago
This is not important, but how did they arrive at "E10S" when they went about shortening "electrolysis"? Anybody know?
- nubs 10y ago
  It's similar to the naming convention used by other long, hard-to-spell words for projects. First letter of word, number of letters in the middle, last letter of word. e10s = electrolysis i18n = internationalization l10n = localization k8s = kubernetes
  - BuckRogers 10y ago
    Interesting. I really dislike that though as I prefer to just learn how to spell the word instead and probably even more mental acrobatics involved. I can see the usage for a product codename to differentiate electrolysis from codename:e10s.
- dionidium 10y ago
  It's the number of letters between the first and last letter of the word. See also: i18n, l10n. Origin: "A DEC employee named Jan Scherpenhuizen was given an email account of S12n by a system administrator, since his name was too long to be an account name. This approach to abbreviating long names was intended to be humorous and became generalized at DEC. The convention was applied to "internationalization" at DEC which was using the numeronym by 1985." http://www.i18nguy.com/origini18n.html http://www.i18nguy.com/origini18n.html
shmerl 10y ago
Will it be enabled on Linux too?
- asadotzler 10y ago
  Yes.
  - shmerl 10y ago
    Good, thanks!

242 points by davezatch 10y ago

>Splitting UI from content means that when a web page is devouring your computer’s processor, your tabs and buttons and menus won’t lock up too. Finally. Every browser I use does this when I load a huge reddit thread while RES in enabled.

gear54rus 10y ago

People blame chrome for being memory hog and it's probably exactly for this reason. I fully expect mem usage to go up for E10S release as well... As a daily FF user both at work and at home, I'm not sure if that's a good thing.

oblio 10y ago
Isn't Chrome multi-process per-tab? Unless I'm misunderstanding, Firefox's e10s will create just 2 processes: UI / content.
- wjoe 10y ago
  I thought the plan was for Firefox to use the same process-per-tab model as Chrome, but this post does seem to imply that it's just 2 - "we’re using project Electrolysis to split Firefox into a UI process and a content process." They also go on to say that "After that, we’ll be working on support for multiple content processes.", so I assume the plan is to have one perocess-per-tab eventually. I'm surprised they aren't there already though, considering this has been in the works for a few years now.
  - keeperofdakeys 10y ago
    There was a period where electrolysis didn't receive much work, and then there was a second push to get it working. That's why it seems to be taking so long. As for process-per-tab, I can't find anything official about it on the bug tracker. The problem with that option is it leads to quite high memory usage, and hides the existence of memory leaks (chrome really likes to eat my ram). We'll have to see how memory usage goes as they experiment with multiple content processes.
  - c0nducktr 10y ago
    It is starting with just two for now, but will be increased after more optimization. There's a setting you can modify in about:config that will allow you to manually set the number of processes if you want to experiment with it. source: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/4hmii4/firefoxs_appeal_has_been_plummeting_according_to/d2r0sad https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/4hmii4/firefoxs_ap...
- deprave 10y ago
  The goal must be a single controller ("UI") process and multiple content processes for each tab, otherwise they'll be missing out on the advantages of a multiprocess model, namely, stability and isolation. They're first going to do two processes, probably for debugging without too many moving parts, then multiprocess. See https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Schedule_and_Status https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Schedule_and_Status and https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/Multiple_content_processes https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/Multiple_content_proce....
  - piotrjurkiewicz 10y ago
    > The goal must be [...] multiple content processes for each tab According to the wiki page you linked, it doesn't seem to be the goal for them: "The (practically) unlimited process count is on some platforms not a realistic goal, and having a separate process for each open site instances or even sites does not seem like a reachable goal (for now at least). Which means using content processes as a security membrane cannot be a goal either." If this is true, I don't see any advantages of e10s introduction.
    - deprave 10y ago
      They're going to find out that managing processes by themselves is going to be very difficult (similar to M:N threading), and opt for a Chrome-like model where each tab is its own process.
      - firethief 10y ago
        That was the original Chrome model but they switched to M:N.
  - sp332 10y ago
    It's not supported, but you can go into about:config and change dom.ipc.processCount to a number higher than one. I haven't had any trouble running at the number of hardware threads, minus one for the UI.
topaxi 10y ago
I'm using nightly builds since about two years and can't remember when exactly I enabled E10S. When I enabled it, I noticed around 20mb more memory usage. So imho this is a good thing, not that much memory for a lot more safety and if Firefox crashes for some reasons, all I have to do is clicking the "reload tabs" button.
- sametmax 10y ago
  So how is it? Does it feel better? Faster ? Slower? Where? When?
  - rangibaby 10y ago
    I've used the developer channel and regular Firefox side by side the entire time and haven't noticed a difference to be honest. One extension I use (rikaichan) froze in e10s, but was fixed.
    - Altenuvian 10y ago
      More performant in my experience - less lag and beachballing. Mac running El Capitan.
  - Sylos 10y ago
    It mostly feels smoother, i.e. less laggy. To me, that's most noticeable when scrolling, which comes from the added implementation of Asynchronous Panning and Zooming (APZ). Basically, beforehand when you turned your scroll wheel, Firefox first sent a scroll event to the webpage, then the webpage could execute whatever it needed to execute on scroll, and then Firefox actually scrolled the page. With APZ, that's now handled in parallel, i.e. it already scrolls what's there and alters it at the same time with whatever the webpage wants to do on scroll. This also applies for zooming the page, as you might have guessed from the name, and as far as I can tell also to resizing the window. Other than that, all animations in the browser UI are a lot smoother, too. For example, I can now just hold down Ctrl+T (which opens new tabs) and it happily chugs through playing the tab-animation hundreds of times with seemingly the only limiting factor being my screen's refresh rate. (And that's on a below-average laptop.)
wjoe 10y ago
Most people still claim Firefox is a memory hog, but from my observations Chrome uses a lot more from it's one process-per-tab model compared to Firefox's single process for many tabs. It might not be significant for a small number of tabs, but as someone who frequently has 50 tabs open (I know, I have a problem), I'm concerned at how much this could increase things. That said, memory usage isn't my biggest concern, I generally have no shortage of memory, and don't particularly care if my browser is using 1GB of RAM. If this improves stability and performance (which seems to have gotten much worse recently on OS X in particular), then it's a fair trade off.
- farresito 10y ago
  I'm not sure if Chrome has an option to disable it, but the thing I dislike the most about Chrome is when you open a past session and it reloads every. single. tab. Firefox is smart: it only reloads the page when you click it. This saves plenty of memory, but Chrome... oh boy.
- hacker42 10y ago
  This is a related bug report: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1125557 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1125557
- snuxoll 10y ago
  > but as someone who frequently has 50 tabs open (I know, I have a problem) How do people get work done WITHOUT having 50 tabs open? It's a pretty regular occurrence for me, between having MSDN, the PostgreSQL handbook, documentation for a half dozen libraries, my "read later" list, etc., there's almost never a day I am not drowning in tabs. Thankfully, the Tree-Style Tabs extension saves the day here!
  - gear54rus 10y ago
    I don't know why people do that. Having 50 of them open does not increase your brain processing capacity, you probably still work with like 10 at maximum. My day typically consists of 6-7 pinned ones and 10 tops dynamic. As a rule, if the tabs reach the end of 1920x1080 screen, it's time to close something :) No tree-style required.
farresito 10y ago
At least Chrome is relatively fast. The only reason I use Firefox is because of a couple of plugins, but otherwise I would dump Firefox and switch to something else (and the plugins barely affect the speed). I really don't know what has been happening to Firefox in the past few months/couple of years, but that's not the browser I remember.
- acdha 10y ago
  Try disabling all of your extensions or using the “Refresh Firefox” command in about:support. These days I rarely notice a difference between the two except on extremely JavaScript-heavy sites – things like asm.js demos, not Gmail – when E10S isn't enabled and so the UI blocks.
  - whyagaindavid 10y ago
    Try about:config Change your browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers = 5 It is a breeze. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.sessionhistory.max_total_v...
TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
Process isolation for tabs could reduce the impact of memory leaks though, right?
- velodrome 10y ago
  Probably not. I have had Chrome tabs go to 10GB of RAM before.
mtgx 10y ago
RAM is cheap. Getting hacked isn't (especially when you consider ransomware these days). That's the reason Chrome is the most secure browser around, and Firefox isn't even invited to Pwn2Own anymore. https://it.slashdot.org/story/16/02/12/034206/pwn2own-2016-wont-attack-firefox-because-its-too-easy https://it.slashdot.org/story/16/02/12/034206/pwn2own-2016-w...
- kuschku 10y ago
  Great, so we have no open browser left anymore? Chrome is at best visible source – Google controls development, not the community – and the others are even fully proprietary Great fucking world.
  - Ichaitei 10y ago
    How about making Firefox more secure (one of the goals of E10s)?
    - kuschku 10y ago
      That can only be done if Firefox has users. Which is hard to do when Google competes unfairly, even illegally – which they did, for example with using AdSense for Chrome ads everywhere, and not paying website owners where the ads were displayed the normal rates, or by adding fraudulent banners "Your browser (Firefox) is outdated, upgrade to Chrome now" to Google Search.
      - kebolio 10y ago
        Can someone answer why this is wrong instead of just downvoting?
        Sylos 10y ago
        Well, it's wrong, because it can not only be done, if Firefox has users. You don't need to care what 99% of the world population is doing. As long as Firefox exists, you can use it. You could say that without many users, there won't enough real-world exposure, but at the same time, Firefox will also be targeted far less, so you wouldn't have to worry about security vulnerabilities as much. And while yes, if at some point Chrome becomes Internet Explorer 2.0 and webpages target nothing else anymore, that could cause Firefox to be hardly usable, but that's then an entirely different nightmare and not anymore relevant to the current situation.
isaacaggrey 10y ago
Memory usage is closely being watched as part of the 10s transition. Of course, e10s is not a free lunch, but according to early claims [1] it's 20% more than non-e10s Firefox and half the usage of Chrome's multi-process implementation. [1]: http://www.erahm.org/2016/02/12/are-they-slim-yet/ http://www.erahm.org/2016/02/12/are-they-slim-yet/

sonnyp 10y ago

There are interesting data and comparisons without E10S on https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/Release_Criteria https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/Release_Criteria and http://www.erahm.org/2016/02/11/memory-usage-of-firefox-with-e10s-enabled/ http://www.erahm.org/2016/02/11/memory-usage-of-firefox-with...

sumanthvepa 10y ago

Wonder what happens when the ui process crashes with the backend process still running? Or vice versa? It seems like killing Firefox just became a whole lot more difficult.

zxcvcxz 10y ago
I imagine it will still be straight forward on Linux/Unix.
gear54rus 10y ago
It's very likely that OS-level facilities will be used to interlock those processes in such a way that no tabs can exist without the UI to attach to... It seems fairly obvious that this scenario should be handled in some way. You probably won't have to kill anything new.
kristofferR 10y ago
I just tried - the "Firefox Web Content" process was automatically killed quickly after the "Firefox" process was killed. No surprise there, it would be weird if they hadn't considered that scenario. If the "Web Content" process is killed while the main Firefox process is running, Firefox asks if you want to restore the tabs - which is half the point of e10s. "killall firefox" would be easy to do anyway.

morsch 10y ago

Notably, it'll remain disabled by default if you're using extensions (pretty much everybody here who is running Firefox?): The groups that will have to wait a bit for E10S account for about half of our release users and include Windows XP users, users with screen readers, RTL users, and the largest group, extension users. You can manually enable it, though[0]: However, if you want to permanently opt-in, you can do so with a simple pref change. Just go to about:config and toggle browser.tabs.remote.autostart to true. On your next restart, e10s should be active. To verify that it is active, go to about:support and look for a number higher than 0 in "Multiprocess Windows". I didn't realize they had this kind of fine-grained control over A/B-testing in their Firefox beta population, as Asa puts it: We have all the knobs. I understand where they are coming from, but it feels a bit weird to have a piece of software running on my computer checking in with a remote server to enable/disable functionality. [0] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis

wjoe 10y ago
Any reason why it won't be enabled for people using extensions? This makes me worry that there's some significant incompatibility with extensions, and that when they do enable it for everyone, it'll break some of the extensions I use. I suspect that splitting the UI and content into multiple processes would make certain things very difficult.
- crc32 10y ago
  Extensions that access stuff that "lives" in the content process can be rewritten or shimmed; but this hasn't been finished yet for all extensions. There's a list of extension status here: https://www.arewee10syet.com/ https://www.arewee10syet.com/
- thristian 10y ago
  It is exactly that. Some extensions (it used to be "many extensions" before E10S was enabled on the Nightly and Aurora channels) assume that they can call back and forth between page content and browser chrome, which is easy when they're all JS objects in the same memory space, but which doesn't work nearly as well between processes. It might be worth downloading Firefox Developer Edition (which uses a separate profile) and installing your usual suite of extensions to check they all still work. The only extension I personally know is weird under E10S is "It's All Text", where the edit button doesn't appear on textareas until you switch to a different tab and back. Other extensions like uBlock Origin, Tree Style Tabs, Open In Browser, HTTPS Everywhere, Document Font Toggle all work fine.

fauigerzigerk 10y ago

I'm trying Firefox about once a year because I want to like it for being independent and privacy minded. But every time I find myself going back to other browsers for seemingly minor reasons. The most important one is that firefox opens new windows a few hundered milliseconds too slowly (on Mac OS X). Just a little bit too slowly for me to just hit Cmd+N and blindly start typing a url. I have to stop and pay attention to when the window is ready, hundereds of times a day. Another annoyance, a much less important one, is that Firefox wastes a lot of screen real estate at the top.

joelthelion 10y ago
You open new windows hundreds of times a day?
- fauigerzigerk 10y ago
  Yes
  - joelthelion 10y ago
    Can you explain why? I'm genuinely curious.
    - lloeki 10y ago
      Windows as tab groups. Some of those are quite persistent, but many are very transient and don't live longer than a dozen minutes. There are OSes with potent window managers. Ideally tabs should even be part of the WM itself† and not be reinvented across each app††, or disappear altogether (e.g Chrome on Android, Exposé/Mission Control per app window grouping) † possibly even allowing tabs to be a mix of apps †† features such as pinned tabs, the defunct Firefox tab groups/overview, Vivaldi are especially egregious examples.
    - fauigerzigerk 10y ago
      The primary reason is that I search for everything instead of navigating to it on individual websites. That includes function signatures and other API stuff I need all day long. And I don't keep windows or tabs open because they are hard to find again and start to pile up. So I open and close them a lot. I don't use the bookmarks menu directly. I just open a new window and start typing. Either the page I'm looking for is in the auto complete or I hit enter and it goes to the search engine. To sum it up, I have trouble remembering hierarchies and various navigation and UX ideas that web designers come up with. I have trouble visually grasping what's on a page (it's a kind of disability I always had). So instead I search. In fact, that's also one of the great things about Firefox. Typing in its location bar lets me find other open windows and tabs. I love that.

darklajid 10y ago

Is E10S going to replace the current model? I mean - is the plan to drop the choice when E10S is stable/works for all known scenarios? I'm asking because I might have a bit of a problem with my tab addiction (my phone regularly reaches 60+, my laptop or desktop probable sit around 2-3 times that for weeks at a time) and I don't think that'll translate well into a process-per-tab model. Yes, I know about bookmarks, read-later tools and that this isn't the healthiest habit.

sp332 10y ago
FF doesn't use process per tab. It will use one process for chrome and one for all the content rendering for all tabs.
- dkns 10y ago
  It will in the future from what I understand. You can enable it right now in nightly.
  - sp332 10y ago
    You can set a certain max number of processes. I don't think there's a way to explicitly do process-per-tab or process-per-domain.
    - johnp_ 10y ago
      There isn't. It is planned to add an algorithm for grouping tabs into processes and dynamically adding/removing content processes, but that's low priority right now, because the current focus lies on getting the single content process e10s ready for the release channel. More info in the e10s-multi bug and its dependencies: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/showdependencytree.cgi?id=e10s-multi&hide_resolved=1 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/showdependencytree.cgi?id=e10s-... (also a nice way to look for known issues that might affect you if you're interested in trying out e10s-multi)
- ascagnel_ 10y ago

piotrjurkiewicz 10y ago

> Splitting UI from content means that when a web page is devouring your computer’s processor, your tabs and buttons and menus won’t lock up too. Well, for that particular problem, there is a much simpler solution than splitting application into two distinct processes. It's called multithreading. Moving UI into a separate thread would not only be simpler than moving it into a separate process, but also wouldn't result in 20-50% memory usage growth.

deprave 10y ago
That's what they're doing now and it's the problem, not the solution. Multiple threads run in the same process address space. This creates security and stability issues. One website can affect the complete experience. That's exactly the problem they're trying to solve, the same way Chrome did, by using multiple processes. That way, for example, when one process misbehaves and gobbles up too much memory, the OS won't kill the entire browser but just the offending tab. (The OS won't kill individual threads.)
- the8472 10y ago
  > security and stability That's shifting goalposts. GP quoted that it's about responsiveness and resource consumption. And resource consumption is obviously lower with multi-threading since more data structures can be shared.
  - deprave 10y ago
    That's not shifting goalposts, that's the goal from the start. You seem to be throwing a lot of technical terms. Could you elaborate on where exactly do you see overhead coming from in a multiprocess vs. multithread architecture? And which data structures can be shared between threads but not between processes? Scheduling overhead is identical and pure OS memory overhead is slightly higher for processes (they need more "accounting" data), but everything else can be optimized at the application level. Furthermore, shared memory lets you share data structures between processes just fine (heck, some data can be shared between processes and the kernel!), and since I assume the content processes will be dynamically linked, you're not even going to load shared libraries multiple times.

sp332 10y ago

Could someone running e10s load up newegg.com and see if it freezes the browser for about 30 seconds? Separating processes is supposed to mean that chrome stays responsive, but that hasn't been my experience with it.

nprescott 10y ago
Loaded 2,875KB over 107 requests in 168 seconds and no visible freezing on newegg.com with e10s enabled.
- sp332 10y ago
  So just me then :( I've tried it on two machines, with and without extensions installed. On my poor laptop it locked up for over a minute.
  - epmatsw 10y ago
    R/Firefox is doing a performance AMA today, asking/helping people to run a profiler extension while hitting flows that cause sluggishness. You should stop by and see if they can help you out and get a bug report started.
- satysin 10y ago
  > 168 seconds wtf?! It loads fully loads in around 4 seconds for me (Chrome stable x64, Windows 10)
  - nprescott 10y ago
    The load time has nothing to do with Firefox or my operating system, it's a direct effect of bandwidth (mine is obviously limited). It's a content-heavy page with a huge number of requests.
    - scholia 10y ago
      Loads here in Firefox (not e10s, with about 100 tabs) in 2.962 seconds -- 232K loaded, with 70 images. No delays or freezes. I'm also running uBlock Origin and Ghostery, which is blocking 7 trackers....

mp3geek 10y ago

The main issue I find with E10s (nightly user here), is on some heavy sites which requires firefox to load on a specific tab, will often get the dreaded "swirl arrow reload" animation on other open tabs until the site is loaded.

whoisthemachine 10y ago
FWIW, I use multiple processes (the number of cores * 2 + 1, it's a magical number I grabbed from somewhere), and get that far less frequently.
- wldcordeiro 10y ago
  Is that number of physical cores? Or would you use 8 with an i7?
  - whoisthemachine 10y ago
    I guess I use full number of logical cores

mtgx 10y ago

Sounds like even though it's been delayed for years, Electrolysis is still not anywhere close to being ready for prime time. And it's not even a full process sandbox. How many more years are we going to wait for that?

izzle49 10y ago

Tried it, still not as responsive as chrome

sammoth 10y ago
In what way?
- izzle49 10y ago
  hangs on js intensive pages, like jira

whoisthemachine 10y ago

Congrats!

ritonlajoie 10y ago

Since a couple of years I can't use firefox anymore with the usual must have privacy extensions. It's super slow and laggy compared to chrome ;( I wish I would use firefox but I can't see it freeze completely everytime I click on a link.

scholia 10y ago
Firefox got to be much better a couple of years ago. In my experience, it's generally equal to or better than Chrome.

danilocesar 10y ago

That sounds awesome!!! 7-years-late awesome, but still great news!

hacker42 10y ago

I am still patiently waiting until unloaded tabs have a memory footprint of 0KB instead of 0.7MB.

epmatsw 10y ago
Serious question, why does that matter? If you've got a thousand tabs open, that's 700mb, or roughly 4% of your (probably) 16gb of memory. Why worry?
- hacker42 10y ago
  I have a pretty old machine without memory upgrade options. Of course, it would not be an issue on a machine with 16 GB. I've been following the bugs with tab-related memory and perf issues for quite a while, but maybe you are right that Moore's Law fixed them by now and I should upgrade.

bobsgame 10y ago

This is great. I've been using Firefox since Phoenix and it only continues getting better!

airnomad 10y ago

My biggest issue with FF is Firebug - it just can't compete with Chrome dev tools. On the other hand, FF has one huge advantage - Pentadactyl.

mintplant 10y ago
Firebug or the Firefox Developer Tools? The built-in DevTools have been pretty great for a while now.
jobigoud 10y ago
Does Firebug has anything over the built-in FF dev tools at this point?
- johnp_ 10y ago
  The built-in dev tools have improved drastically in the latest versions of Firefox and that's also why [Firebug.next](https://getfirebug.com/downloads https://getfirebug.com/downloads) (aka Firebug 3) isn't a standalone panel any more, but is integrated with and built upon the native dev tools.
baby 10y ago
I haven't used Firebug in decades, the native tools are more than enough (and way better presented than Chrome imo). If it's not enough there is Firefox Developer Edition[1]. But not talking about development. How can you use a browser that does not allow for tabs to be displayed on the side? Tree Style Tab[2] on Firefox makes it the best browser for me. [1]: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/ [2]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

DavidWanjiru 10y ago

This is not important, but how did they arrive at "E10S" when they went about shortening "electrolysis"? Anybody know?

nubs 10y ago
It's similar to the naming convention used by other long, hard-to-spell words for projects. First letter of word, number of letters in the middle, last letter of word. e10s = electrolysis i18n = internationalization l10n = localization k8s = kubernetes
- BuckRogers 10y ago
  Interesting. I really dislike that though as I prefer to just learn how to spell the word instead and probably even more mental acrobatics involved. I can see the usage for a product codename to differentiate electrolysis from codename:e10s.
dionidium 10y ago
It's the number of letters between the first and last letter of the word. See also: i18n, l10n. Origin: "A DEC employee named Jan Scherpenhuizen was given an email account of S12n by a system administrator, since his name was too long to be an account name. This approach to abbreviating long names was intended to be humorous and became generalized at DEC. The convention was applied to "internationalization" at DEC which was using the numeronym by 1985." http://www.i18nguy.com/origini18n.html http://www.i18nguy.com/origini18n.html

shmerl 10y ago

Will it be enabled on Linux too?

asadotzler 10y ago
Yes.
- shmerl 10y ago
  Good, thanks!