5 ms·

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.
        • homulilly 10y ago
          Yeah that's correct. Awesome!
  • 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).