7 ms·

Improvements in Firefox for Desktop and Android

67 points by ehPReth 10y ago

sdegutis 10y ago
> Today we’re proud to announce the initial rollout of multi-process Firefox for Desktop to our general audience. With this, we’re taking a major step forward in improving Firefox for Desktop. Users should experience a Firefox that is less susceptible to freezing and is generally more responsive to input, while retaining the experience and features that users love. Really? That's it? I mean, don't get me wrong, that's great. But I kind of assumed FF already had this. Didn't Chrome roll this exact feature out like 6 years ago?
- morganvachon 10y ago
  If you use Firefox and Chrome side by side every day, you can definitely tell that Firefox lacked it until now. This is especially evident on older Macs and most Linux distros I've tried. Chrome/Chromium's performance is leaps and bounds ahead of Firefox, RAM usage notwithstanding. I'm eager to try this out when I get home tonight.
  - sdegutis 10y ago
    I definitely don't use Firefox except when testing how our website looks in Firefox. But it's not because of laggy behavior. Come to think of it, it's because Firefox just feels... weird and unnatural, compared to Chrome or even Edge.
    - nitrogen 10y ago
      That's just familiarity talking, though. Every browser has its slight scrolling and rendering and UI quirks to get used to.
      - porjo 10y ago
        This. As a Firefox user I have the same 'feeling' going back the other way. With regards to developer tools, I find the tools that I use constantly - console, inspector, network activity - to be superior on Firefox... Each to his own I suppose.
    - Sylos 10y ago
      Are you sure that it's not anyways, because of lagginess (i.e. did you try the new release)? The addition of e10s has also majorly improved scrolling performance (through the implementation of Asynchronous Panning and Zooming [0]), which I've personally found to be exactly that, it felt weird beforehand, but I couldn't have told you what was wrong exactly... [0] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2016/02/smoother-scrolling-in-firefox-46-with-apz/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2016/02/smoother-scrolling-in-fire...
- Sylos 10y ago
  Chrome was designed with multi-core processors in mind. Firefox wasn't, since obviously multi-core processors weren't really a thing when Firefox was initially released. As a result, Mozilla had to tear up a big chunk of the architecture to implement it. That's why it took so long. A simple case of technical debt.
  - c0nducktr 10y ago
    And they also didn't work on it for the entire six years since Chrome was released. The project was shelved temporarily while development was focused on other things. I have been running Firefox Nightly along side Chrome for the past year or so, and have been using it as my main browser for a few months now, and I've been really happy with its performance.
  - gcp 10y ago
    Not only tear up the architecture, but also accept that a major competitive advantage (the add-on ecosystem) would be for some part collateral damage in the transition.
dchuk 10y ago
I've always been a fan of Firefox, switching to it years and years ago, but Chrome's performance was always a bit smoother because of multi-process, and their dev tools are top notch. The flipside is that Chrome is a major resource hog too, often taking up half or more of my 16gb of RAM. Curious if Firefox can now compete performance-wise without going down the same resource path.
- nitrogen 10y ago
  It really bothered me when browsers decided they owned your machine and removed manual cache size limits. What if I want to use my browser at the same time as something I actually want to use all my RAM?
  - softawre 10y ago
    Sadly, you use another browser. Safari is pretty good at not crapping all over your computer.
  - vmarsy 10y ago
    If you're using an OS that lets you setup restrictions per process, you could do something like this: https://gist.github.com/juanje/9861623 https://gist.github.com/juanje/9861623: I was tired of Chrome eating all my laptop resources so I decided to put some limit to it with cgroup.
- mrinterweb 10y ago
  If you often have many tabs open, Firefox the better choice in terms of memory consumption. I use Chrome for more "appy" web sites, and Firefox for the rest of my casual browsing.
  - neves 10y ago
    funny, Firefox is always the greatest memory hog in my machine. Probably due to uBlock.
    - 10y ago
isomorphic 10y ago
Searching about:config for e10s, I see I'm in the "disqualified-control" "e10s.rollout.cohort". Looking further, I see "extensions.e10sBlockedByAddons" and "extensions.e10sBlocksEnabling" are both true. So, one or more add-ons are presumably incompatible with the feature, but even if I uninstalled those (which ones?) I might still be in Mozilla's control group, and there's no clear way to override that.
- sirn 10y ago
  > even if I uninstalled those (which ones?) I think you can see the partial list of extensions at https://www.arewee10syet.com/ https://www.arewee10syet.com/ The result seems to be restricted to only few top extensions, though. Edit: I remembered it used to have a lot more extensions listed, apparently they have recently rebuilt the site[1][2]: [1]: https://github.com/andymckay/arewee10syet https://github.com/andymckay/arewee10syet [2]: https://github.com/andymckay/new-arewee10syet.com https://github.com/andymckay/new-arewee10syet.com
  - Sylos 10y ago
    The previous page was just a crappy Google Doc embedded into the page, so they probably tidied it up before release...
- Sylos 10y ago
  Currently, having any add-on installed will block it. In the future, they want to work with a whitelist, but for now, they are being extremely cautious with the rollout, since e10s is considered the biggest architectural change that Firefox has ever gone through. Here's their (very preliminary and not terribly official) schedule: https://wiki.mozilla.org/E10s#Schedule https://wiki.mozilla.org/E10s#Schedule
pasbesoin 10y ago
So, at what point do the extensions I use, and for which in good part I prefer Firefox, start dying?
- richardwhiuk 10y ago
  Why do you think extensions won't be supported?
  - Macha 10y ago
    https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-developing-firefox-add-ons/ https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-dev... WebExtensions / Chrome-style extensions are pretty limited to things which the browser dev already anticipated needing support for, while the old model let them do pretty much anything the browser could. While it's certainly possible for Tree Style Tabs or uBlock Origin to be ported to/rewritten for Web Extensions when it's finished, that's only because there has been proven demand for the API to support those features. When the next addon developer with an idea of that level of modification to the browser comes around, they're simply not going to be able to do it unless they manage to persuade Mozilla to give them APIs needed. That's not to mention addon developers that won't care enough to update their addons to stop using XUL when it goes away.
    - jonathanyc 10y ago
      As far as I can tell, Mozilla is really trying to help extension authors port their add-ons. They have lines of communication with the developers of the most popular add-ons. I think the advantage of Firefox in this space is that so many of the developers are volunteers and/or "power users" themselves.
    - Macha 10y ago
      Additionally, since it just bit me in the ass today, a lot more short term than the end of XUL: I can no longer install YouTube Center on Firefox 48 on Windows. They removed the about:config override that enabled installing unsigned addons. Which is very annoying.
vegardx 10y ago
Still no way to run multiple independent windows without a lot of dirty hacks. This is the only thing that keeps me with Chrome: The ability to close a certain set of windows when I'm done at work and have them out of the way. Or the other way around, close windows with private and personal things. I don't understand what stops Firefox from implementing something similar. They already have the concept of profiles. Just no ability to run them simultaneously.
- dsp1234 10y ago
  without a lot of dirty hacks http://kb.mozillazine.org/Opening_a_new_instance_of_Firefox_with_another_profile http://kb.mozillazine.org/Opening_a_new_instance_of_Firefox_... Creating an independent set of windows with FF is as easy as creating a shortcut with the '-no-remote' option. Using '-P -no-remote' will open a new independent window and show the profile manager (so you can have one shortcut to run multiple profiles). If you already have a short list of profiles you like to run, then you can hard code the profile name is as well.
  - vegardx 10y ago
    It makes no sense that I have to modify the start up options or (on OSX) create a shortcut in Automator to set the correct start up options. In Chrome it has been solved very nicely. But it looks like this is being solved in future versions of Firefox, which is nice. I've tried to do it the way you described, but it just feels messy. Even more so when your dock ends up with X-amount of Firefox-icons, instead of grouping them together like Chrome does. But I guess people have different preferences.
    - jonathanyc 10y ago
      Do you mean you would prefer it to be a preference rather than a command line flag?
  - cpeterso 10y ago
    You can use Firefox's about:profiles page to manage your Firefox profiles without using the command line parameters.
JohnTHaller 10y ago
For the curious, you're likely using one or more extensions and thus multi-process won't be on when you update to it. Mozilla is rolling it out cautiously, so everyone with any extensions at all is excluded and everyone with no extensions either has it on or is in the 'control group' which will be used to judge the affect that enabling multi-process has on stability based on telemetry reports from both groups.
grok2 10y ago
Since I didn't have any luck finding an answer to this at Mozilla, does anyone know why McAfee SiteAdvisor is able to automatically enable it's add-on in Firefox? Even after I disable it in the add-ons manager, the next update to McAfee software re-enables the add-on by itself. (This add-on places a green or red check-mark against google (and possibly other) search results to indicate if it's safe or not to click on a link in the search results). When using the McAfee security suite, they don't provide any option to choose what it's add-on does.
- jonathanyc 10y ago
  I really really hate those. As far as I could tell when I investigated, these guys actually modify the file system from under the browser (Firefox, Chrome) so there's not much the browser can do.
  - brokenmachine 10y ago
    Those virus protection programs act more like viruses every day...
- Sylos 10y ago
  Type "about:config" into the URL-bar and hit enter. Confirm to the dialog that you'll be cautious and then search in that page for "xpinstall.signatures.required". I'm guessing, that this is disabled for you. If it is, and you want to get rid of the McAfee-extension, then remove the McAfee extension and re-enable xpinstall.signatures.required. It shouldn't be able to reinstall then. If it does anyways, check about:config, again, if that preference is re-enabled. If it is re-enabled, either some add-on in your add-on-list is malicious and re-enabling it, which then allows McAfee to reinstall, or McAfee is abusing the prefs.js-file in your Profile-folder ([0]), which can be used to set about:config-values. All in all, that this is an about:config-toggle to begin with, is kind of crap, as it makes this sort of stuff possible. Mozilla has plans to eventually remove this about:config-toggle from standard Firefox and instead provide a separate unbranded version of Firefox which then does still have that toggle for people who want to use unsigned extensions, but for now, this change has been put on hold, because things have been going fine, and it would just mean additional organizational chaos as well as people, who don't know about the unbranded version, screaming about Mozilla creating a walled garden. But if all of the above applied for you, you should probably report this to Mozilla, as that might be enough reason to get them moving on this change. [0] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles-where-firefox-stores-user-data https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles-where-firefox-...
earless1 10y ago
If you would like to force enable Electrolysis. Within about:config create a new boolean pref named browser.tabs.remote.force-enable and set it to true.
- Sylos 10y ago
  If you do, though, understand that this might actually cause you worse performance than you currently have, depending on the add-ons that you use.
scoopr 10y ago
about:config settings to force it on, that I could find: browser.tabs.remote.autostart = true extensions.e10sBlocksEnabling = false
Hydraulix989 10y ago
How will this affect battery life? Right now, I use Firefox instead of Chrome on my Linux laptop because Chrome consumes several watts of juice more than Firefox. This adds up to about an hour of extra battery life over a single charge. I suspect at least part of that is context-switching overhead?
Eridrus 10y ago
I really want to switch to Firefox on Android for the extensions, but I feel like Chrome is still doing a superior job in terms of security, which makes me stick with chrome. I hope e10s is the start of Firefox getting a content sandbox.
- technojunkie 10y ago
  At the very least, adding uBlock Origin add-on and using it in hard mode (https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-hard-mode https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-hard-m...) gives me some peace of mind about Firefox security.

67 points by ehPReth 10y ago

> Today we’re proud to announce the initial rollout of multi-process Firefox for Desktop to our general audience. With this, we’re taking a major step forward in improving Firefox for Desktop. Users should experience a Firefox that is less susceptible to freezing and is generally more responsive to input, while retaining the experience and features that users love. Really? That's it? I mean, don't get me wrong, that's great. But I kind of assumed FF already had this. Didn't Chrome roll this exact feature out like 6 years ago?

morganvachon 10y ago
If you use Firefox and Chrome side by side every day, you can definitely tell that Firefox lacked it until now. This is especially evident on older Macs and most Linux distros I've tried. Chrome/Chromium's performance is leaps and bounds ahead of Firefox, RAM usage notwithstanding. I'm eager to try this out when I get home tonight.
- sdegutis 10y ago
  I definitely don't use Firefox except when testing how our website looks in Firefox. But it's not because of laggy behavior. Come to think of it, it's because Firefox just feels... weird and unnatural, compared to Chrome or even Edge.
  - nitrogen 10y ago
    That's just familiarity talking, though. Every browser has its slight scrolling and rendering and UI quirks to get used to.
    - porjo 10y ago
      This. As a Firefox user I have the same 'feeling' going back the other way. With regards to developer tools, I find the tools that I use constantly - console, inspector, network activity - to be superior on Firefox... Each to his own I suppose.
  - Sylos 10y ago
    Are you sure that it's not anyways, because of lagginess (i.e. did you try the new release)? The addition of e10s has also majorly improved scrolling performance (through the implementation of Asynchronous Panning and Zooming [0]), which I've personally found to be exactly that, it felt weird beforehand, but I couldn't have told you what was wrong exactly... [0] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2016/02/smoother-scrolling-in-firefox-46-with-apz/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2016/02/smoother-scrolling-in-fire...
Sylos 10y ago
Chrome was designed with multi-core processors in mind. Firefox wasn't, since obviously multi-core processors weren't really a thing when Firefox was initially released. As a result, Mozilla had to tear up a big chunk of the architecture to implement it. That's why it took so long. A simple case of technical debt.
- c0nducktr 10y ago
  And they also didn't work on it for the entire six years since Chrome was released. The project was shelved temporarily while development was focused on other things. I have been running Firefox Nightly along side Chrome for the past year or so, and have been using it as my main browser for a few months now, and I've been really happy with its performance.
- gcp 10y ago
  Not only tear up the architecture, but also accept that a major competitive advantage (the add-on ecosystem) would be for some part collateral damage in the transition.

dchuk 10y ago

I've always been a fan of Firefox, switching to it years and years ago, but Chrome's performance was always a bit smoother because of multi-process, and their dev tools are top notch. The flipside is that Chrome is a major resource hog too, often taking up half or more of my 16gb of RAM. Curious if Firefox can now compete performance-wise without going down the same resource path.

nitrogen 10y ago
It really bothered me when browsers decided they owned your machine and removed manual cache size limits. What if I want to use my browser at the same time as something I actually want to use all my RAM?
- softawre 10y ago
  Sadly, you use another browser. Safari is pretty good at not crapping all over your computer.
- vmarsy 10y ago
  If you're using an OS that lets you setup restrictions per process, you could do something like this: https://gist.github.com/juanje/9861623 https://gist.github.com/juanje/9861623: I was tired of Chrome eating all my laptop resources so I decided to put some limit to it with cgroup.
mrinterweb 10y ago
If you often have many tabs open, Firefox the better choice in terms of memory consumption. I use Chrome for more "appy" web sites, and Firefox for the rest of my casual browsing.
- neves 10y ago
  funny, Firefox is always the greatest memory hog in my machine. Probably due to uBlock.
  - 10y ago

isomorphic 10y ago

Searching about:config for e10s, I see I'm in the "disqualified-control" "e10s.rollout.cohort". Looking further, I see "extensions.e10sBlockedByAddons" and "extensions.e10sBlocksEnabling" are both true. So, one or more add-ons are presumably incompatible with the feature, but even if I uninstalled those (which ones?) I might still be in Mozilla's control group, and there's no clear way to override that.

sirn 10y ago
> even if I uninstalled those (which ones?) I think you can see the partial list of extensions at https://www.arewee10syet.com/ https://www.arewee10syet.com/ The result seems to be restricted to only few top extensions, though. Edit: I remembered it used to have a lot more extensions listed, apparently they have recently rebuilt the site[1][2]: [1]: https://github.com/andymckay/arewee10syet https://github.com/andymckay/arewee10syet [2]: https://github.com/andymckay/new-arewee10syet.com https://github.com/andymckay/new-arewee10syet.com
- Sylos 10y ago
  The previous page was just a crappy Google Doc embedded into the page, so they probably tidied it up before release...
Sylos 10y ago
Currently, having any add-on installed will block it. In the future, they want to work with a whitelist, but for now, they are being extremely cautious with the rollout, since e10s is considered the biggest architectural change that Firefox has ever gone through. Here's their (very preliminary and not terribly official) schedule: https://wiki.mozilla.org/E10s#Schedule https://wiki.mozilla.org/E10s#Schedule

pasbesoin 10y ago

So, at what point do the extensions I use, and for which in good part I prefer Firefox, start dying?

richardwhiuk 10y ago
Why do you think extensions won't be supported?
- Macha 10y ago
  https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-developing-firefox-add-ons/ https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-dev... WebExtensions / Chrome-style extensions are pretty limited to things which the browser dev already anticipated needing support for, while the old model let them do pretty much anything the browser could. While it's certainly possible for Tree Style Tabs or uBlock Origin to be ported to/rewritten for Web Extensions when it's finished, that's only because there has been proven demand for the API to support those features. When the next addon developer with an idea of that level of modification to the browser comes around, they're simply not going to be able to do it unless they manage to persuade Mozilla to give them APIs needed. That's not to mention addon developers that won't care enough to update their addons to stop using XUL when it goes away.
  - jonathanyc 10y ago
    As far as I can tell, Mozilla is really trying to help extension authors port their add-ons. They have lines of communication with the developers of the most popular add-ons. I think the advantage of Firefox in this space is that so many of the developers are volunteers and/or "power users" themselves.
  - Macha 10y ago
    Additionally, since it just bit me in the ass today, a lot more short term than the end of XUL: I can no longer install YouTube Center on Firefox 48 on Windows. They removed the about:config override that enabled installing unsigned addons. Which is very annoying.

vegardx 10y ago

Still no way to run multiple independent windows without a lot of dirty hacks. This is the only thing that keeps me with Chrome: The ability to close a certain set of windows when I'm done at work and have them out of the way. Or the other way around, close windows with private and personal things. I don't understand what stops Firefox from implementing something similar. They already have the concept of profiles. Just no ability to run them simultaneously.

dsp1234 10y ago
without a lot of dirty hacks http://kb.mozillazine.org/Opening_a_new_instance_of_Firefox_with_another_profile http://kb.mozillazine.org/Opening_a_new_instance_of_Firefox_... Creating an independent set of windows with FF is as easy as creating a shortcut with the '-no-remote' option. Using '-P -no-remote' will open a new independent window and show the profile manager (so you can have one shortcut to run multiple profiles). If you already have a short list of profiles you like to run, then you can hard code the profile name is as well.
- vegardx 10y ago
  It makes no sense that I have to modify the start up options or (on OSX) create a shortcut in Automator to set the correct start up options. In Chrome it has been solved very nicely. But it looks like this is being solved in future versions of Firefox, which is nice. I've tried to do it the way you described, but it just feels messy. Even more so when your dock ends up with X-amount of Firefox-icons, instead of grouping them together like Chrome does. But I guess people have different preferences.
  - jonathanyc 10y ago
    Do you mean you would prefer it to be a preference rather than a command line flag?
- cpeterso 10y ago
  You can use Firefox's about:profiles page to manage your Firefox profiles without using the command line parameters.

JohnTHaller 10y ago

For the curious, you're likely using one or more extensions and thus multi-process won't be on when you update to it. Mozilla is rolling it out cautiously, so everyone with any extensions at all is excluded and everyone with no extensions either has it on or is in the 'control group' which will be used to judge the affect that enabling multi-process has on stability based on telemetry reports from both groups.

grok2 10y ago

Since I didn't have any luck finding an answer to this at Mozilla, does anyone know why McAfee SiteAdvisor is able to automatically enable it's add-on in Firefox? Even after I disable it in the add-ons manager, the next update to McAfee software re-enables the add-on by itself. (This add-on places a green or red check-mark against google (and possibly other) search results to indicate if it's safe or not to click on a link in the search results). When using the McAfee security suite, they don't provide any option to choose what it's add-on does.

jonathanyc 10y ago
I really really hate those. As far as I could tell when I investigated, these guys actually modify the file system from under the browser (Firefox, Chrome) so there's not much the browser can do.
- brokenmachine 10y ago
  Those virus protection programs act more like viruses every day...
Sylos 10y ago
Type "about:config" into the URL-bar and hit enter. Confirm to the dialog that you'll be cautious and then search in that page for "xpinstall.signatures.required". I'm guessing, that this is disabled for you. If it is, and you want to get rid of the McAfee-extension, then remove the McAfee extension and re-enable xpinstall.signatures.required. It shouldn't be able to reinstall then. If it does anyways, check about:config, again, if that preference is re-enabled. If it is re-enabled, either some add-on in your add-on-list is malicious and re-enabling it, which then allows McAfee to reinstall, or McAfee is abusing the prefs.js-file in your Profile-folder ([0]), which can be used to set about:config-values. All in all, that this is an about:config-toggle to begin with, is kind of crap, as it makes this sort of stuff possible. Mozilla has plans to eventually remove this about:config-toggle from standard Firefox and instead provide a separate unbranded version of Firefox which then does still have that toggle for people who want to use unsigned extensions, but for now, this change has been put on hold, because things have been going fine, and it would just mean additional organizational chaos as well as people, who don't know about the unbranded version, screaming about Mozilla creating a walled garden. But if all of the above applied for you, you should probably report this to Mozilla, as that might be enough reason to get them moving on this change. [0] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles-where-firefox-stores-user-data https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles-where-firefox-...

earless1 10y ago

If you would like to force enable Electrolysis. Within about:config create a new boolean pref named browser.tabs.remote.force-enable and set it to true.

Sylos 10y ago
If you do, though, understand that this might actually cause you worse performance than you currently have, depending on the add-ons that you use.

scoopr 10y ago

about:config settings to force it on, that I could find: browser.tabs.remote.autostart = true extensions.e10sBlocksEnabling = false

Hydraulix989 10y ago

How will this affect battery life? Right now, I use Firefox instead of Chrome on my Linux laptop because Chrome consumes several watts of juice more than Firefox. This adds up to about an hour of extra battery life over a single charge. I suspect at least part of that is context-switching overhead?

Eridrus 10y ago

I really want to switch to Firefox on Android for the extensions, but I feel like Chrome is still doing a superior job in terms of security, which makes me stick with chrome. I hope e10s is the start of Firefox getting a content sandbox.

technojunkie 10y ago
At the very least, adding uBlock Origin add-on and using it in hard mode (https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-hard-mode https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-hard-m...) gives me some peace of mind about Firefox security.