10 ms·

This all seems a bit sensationalist. Mozilla tried a few other things, mostly didn't work out, maybe a bit distracted from Firefox. The decline from 2010 was ab

• homulilly 10y ago
  the poor state of e10s feels like neglect to me
  • 0x4a42 10y ago
    What's the problem with e10s?
    • jsight 10y ago
      I assume the problem is just that it seems to be moving towards completion at a snail's pace. It certainly feels like I have been hearing about it for a LONG time without a stable release.
      • KingMob 10y ago
        Yeah, but it's a massive reworking of the FF internals, so it took a long time to complete. But I'm using it now, and it works pretty well. My only hitch was needing to turn off some older add-ons. While Mozilla is still doing a slow roll-out, it disables E10s if it can't ensure your plugins will work. (One of mine was a HN add-on, amusingly.) Most of the opoular add-ons are ready, though. To check, see: https://www.arewee10syet.com/ https://www.arewee10syet.com/
        • jsight 10y ago
          Of course, the reasons for it taking a while to get done are completely reasonable. :)
        • Aldo_MX 10y ago
          I would recommend the following add-on to know which add-ons are incompatible with e10s: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-compatibility-reporter/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-compat...
      • oconnore 10y ago
        It might be because it's running without you knowing about it? Preferences > Enable multi-process is checked for me.
        • jsight 10y ago
          I don't believe that I have that option at all here (Firefox 51.0 on Fedora 25).
          • sp332 10y ago
            This is kinda confusing, but that button only exists in Nightly and Developer builds. Here's how to check, enable, and force-enable it for regular builds: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Testing https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Testing
        • homulilly 10y ago
          Still doesn't work in a number of situations like if you have a touch screen.
          • oconnore 10y ago
            (I just clicked the reply button to you using my touch screen on e10s. This is Fedora 25, on Wayland -- Firefox is using XWayland.)
            • sp332 10y ago
              I think this is a Win8 problem. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Schedule https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Schedule
          • dblohm7 10y ago
            You must be running Windows. I'm the Mozilla developer who is responsible for that. You'll get e10s on touchscreen in version 52.
            • 10y ago
      • sp332 10y ago
        But e10s launched in Firefox 48 https://asadotzler.com/2016/06/06/firefox-48-beta-release-and-e10s/ https://asadotzler.com/2016/06/06/firefox-48-beta-release-an... and hit 35% of all Firefox users by November. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Schedule https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Schedule
      • djsumdog 10y ago
        I did have to force enable it as a few plugins didn't official support it yet. So far it's been amazingly stable though and had sped up my browser considerably.
      • cpeterso 10y ago
        The e10s project actually stated back in 2009. The project was put on hold in 2011 because the architectural changes and add-on compatibility breakage was deemed insurmountable. In 2013, the project resumed and has been chugging away since. You can see 2011-2013 pause in the revision history of Mozilla's Electrolysis wiki page: https://wiki.mozilla.org/index.php?title=Electrolysis&offset=&limit=500&action=history https://wiki.mozilla.org/index.php?title=Electrolysis&offset... I made a burndown chart of the e10s bugs in Bugzilla that shows the development progress. The bug high water mark was in 2016 and today at least 2,495 bugs (specifically tagged as e10s related) have been fixed: https://people-mozilla.org/~cpeterson/burndown/burndown.html?tracking-e10s=+&since=2013-01-01 https://people-mozilla.org/~cpeterson/burndown/burndown.html...
    • Nas808 10y ago
      It's not process-per-tab like Chrome, it's just 2 or 3 processes.
      • kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
        By default. You can have a process per tab if you want.
      • chimeracoder 10y ago
        > It's not process-per-tab like Chrome, it's just 2 or 3 processes. Chrome is not process-per-tab - it's process per domain. (Even that's not true - sometimes tabs from multiple domains will still share the same process). Firefox currently uses two processes (one for the UI, and one for rendering pages), but from a technical standpoint, that's the hard part, and that's what took so many years to develop. Once you have separated UI and rendering processes, going from 1 rendering process to multiple is relatively easy - you can already configure Nightly to do this, and Mozilla is basically just waiting for (a) e10s itself to rolled out more broadly, and (b) empirical evidence on what the right number of processes is, as (a) happens. There are some downsides to doing true process-per-tab (the main one is that it's absurdly inefficient with memory), so ultimately Firefox will probably land on something in between (like Chrome and IE do).
        • orthecreedence 10y ago
          What does IE do?
          • chimeracoder 10y ago
            IE groups tabs into processes, so the number of processes scales sub-linearly with the number of open tabs, and hits a cap after a certain point: https://superuser.com/questions/586622/force-ie-to-use-one-process-per-tab https://superuser.com/questions/586622/force-ie-to-use-one-p...
        • cpeterso 10y ago
          Multiple content processes (two plus the browser UI process) are now enabled in Firefox Nightly (54).
  • ZenoArrow 10y ago
    What's wrong with e10s?
    • TeMPOraL 10y ago
      A better question would be: what is e10s?
      • sp332 10y ago
        Multi-process Firefox. One process for browser chrome and one or more for content. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Overview https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Overview
      • ZenoArrow 10y ago
        I know what it is, so why would that be a better question for me? If you want to ask what e10s is for your own information, that's fine.
  • throwaway2016a 10y ago
    To save some Googling if you're like me and have no idea what e10s is: Electrolysis: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2016/04/11/the-why-of-electrolysis/ https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2016/04/11/the-why-of-electr...
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    • ddt_Osprey 10y ago
      Seriously. These "enumeronyms" drive me batty.
      • pc2g4d 10y ago
        I love this word, enumeronym, though. It seems you may have coined it, as the only Google search result is your comment. The second may well be this comment. I hope it catches on!
        • Mindless2112 10y ago
          Google suggests that the correct term is "numeronym" [1]. > According to Tex Texin, the first numeronym of this kind was "S12n", the electronic mail account name given to Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) employee Jan Scherpenhuizen by a system administrator because his surname was too long to be an account name. By 1985, colleagues who found Jan's name unpronounceable often referred to him verbally as "S12n" (ess-twelve-en). The use of such numeronyms became part of DEC corporate culture. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numeronym https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numeronym
• ashark 10y ago
  I do miss loving Firefox, which hasn't been the case since the 1.x days. Then again, I think these days what I dislike is the Web itself. You can't have a lean, responsive browser like that and support enough of the "advances" of modern CSS and Javascript to render 99.9+% of the Web more or less correctly.
  • jerf 10y ago
    If you look at the cutting edge of browser tech lately, and you read between the lines as to why the browser makers are doing this, you can see that there's a pretty significant trend now towards browsers actually fighting the web itself, because once multiprocess is done and modulo a 2 or 3x rendering speedup that Servo may be able to bring (which will probably be the last advance of that size), the only way for a browser to feel "less klunky" or "speedier" than its competition will be for it to render less of the web. That is, the classic optimization of doing less work. Which in this case means trashing all the shitty ads and plugins from 15 different sites and synchronous JS trackers, since that happens to be what's klunking up the web. Which, fortunately for the browsers, gives them cover to do this under the guise of working for the user, because there's a lot of truth there, but in some sense it's still just cover, too. It is in some sense a change of an era; browsers are moving out of a phase of enabling and empowering content creators and slowly moving into active conflict with them. As slowly as possible in some sense, because it's scary for them, but it's something they're being forced to do. It's the same effect where computer users will blame "Microsoft" or "Dell" for the computer being slow, when the problem is actually a slow hard drive or something; eventually it stops mattering that it isn't "your" fault and you have to do something about it. Big changes in the browser space in the next five years here, I think. Content producers so far have only tepidly fired back at ad blockers and stuff because they're still very niche, but they are getting less niche very fast now.
    • gbersac 10y ago
      > once multiprocess is done and modulo a 2 or 3x rendering speedup that Servo may be able to bring (which will probably be the last advance of that size) That's what we said for years about computing power and the Moor law's : "transistor can't get tynier than xxx nm". It happened anyway because there used to be that much economic incensitive to improve computer. Now research in micro processor is so expensive that the gain in computationnal power are found elsewhere. But there is always ways to improve things. The question is : "is there people eager to fund research". As long as the answer is yes, we'll find ways to improve web browser. In the web there is so much money involved that the answer will still be yes long after servo shipped.
• myowncrapulence 10y ago
  I've been using Firefox for years without any problems and find it much better (just as fast, more privacy-minded) than chrome. I honestly don't understand (from a consumer standpoint) why people complain about Firefox. I can understand devs having browser preferences, but to say that "time forgot" firefox is ridiculous as a general user.
  • ZenoArrow 10y ago
    Agreed. I prefer Firefox, but I recognise there's really not that much difference between Firefox and Chrome in terms of usability and features, they both seem about on par to me (some areas Firefox is slightly ahead, some areas Chrome is slightly ahead). The suggestion that Firefox is something "time forgot" is basically just trolling, someone looking for a reaction rather than something substantial.
    • komali2 10y ago
      The numbers don't back either of your claims, though - significantly more people use Safari and Chrome than use Firefox. I for one appreciate chrome for the fact that it syncs with my google everything, across all devices, google accounts, etc. I'm probably going to hate myself for my blase attitude towards security when I inevitably end up on some massive dump of hacked accounts, but I've kind of given up on privacy/security. It's just so convenient to be able to pull up on my phone the tab I had open on my browser when I'm in the kitchen cooking, or whatever.
      • ZenoArrow 10y ago
        >"The numbers don't back either of your claims, though - significantly more people use Safari and Chrome than use Firefox." The reason we're in disagreement is we're picking different forms of comparison. You're looking at popularity, I'm looking at technology. I don't dispute more people use Chrome, but that doesn't make it automatically better from a technical point of view. As I said before, technically Firefox and Chrome are fairly equal, and there are benchmarks and feature comparisons that back this up.
      • 10y ago
• yellowapple 10y ago
  "I wouldn't say Firefox was leading the way or the biggest innovator in the last few years" That's the thing for me. Before Chrome, Firefox was the big innovator (trailing only behind Opera, and even then). Then Chrome happened, Firefox took a bit of a backseat (not as bad as IE or Safari, but enough of one to let Chrome become the big innovator), and Opera became a reskinned Chrome. It'll be interesting to see how Mozilla approaches the next few years. Firefox still offers features that the other major browsers do not (for example, and critically to my own use case, it's the only major browser that supports any semblance of an equivalent to Tree Style Tabs), and the emphasis on an open and standards-compliant web could reinforce the historical reason why practically every user agent under the sun includes the word "Mozilla".