7 ms·

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

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/

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/