10 ms·
Firefox 54 goes multi-process, eight years after work began
- pvdebbe 9y agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14547559 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14547559
- TokenDiversity 9y agoThose wanting to quickly disable electrolysis for whatever reason- go to about:config and set browser.tabs.remote.autostart to false. If you have an incompatible addon, you'll still not be on the multi-process train. I don't know how to find which add-on is incompatible though (yet)
- pricechild 9y agohttps://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-compatibility-reporter/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-compat... will tell you.
- Tepix 9y agoBut is that add-on multiprocessCompatible itself? :-)
- MagnumOpus 9y agoInstall it and it will tell you! (Spoiler: it is)
- srean 9y agoWell, 800 tabs open is business as usual for me, wonder what it will do in this case. Edit: I get downvoted to oblivion whenever I mention this usecase on HN. Its no different this time but so be it (given the negative karma I have ratched up, I wonder why the thread is even visible. Perhaps because many have commented on it. A new HN UI feature, I suppose). FF is the only browser that has worked well with this rather unusual usage pattern, so am ever so thankful to Mozilla folks. I do a lot of reading and it seriously helps. For those who are feeling exceptionally trigger happy, its not that unusual an usage pattern if you ask around.
- abhinavk 9y agoFirefox has a configurable upper limit through setting dom.ipc.processCount in about:config. Firefox 55 might expose this in its preferences.
- detaro 9y agoNot 800, but I've had e10s enabled for quite a while and it made the difference between "freezes up regularly" and "completely fine" with hundreds of tabs for me.
- mwidell 9y agoJust out of curiosity, why would you want to have 800 open tabs? What is your workflow? Do you use tabs as bookmarks? How do you find open tabs?
- srean 9y agoYeah they are like a volatile bookmarks with a traversable history and a 'this is very interesting but have to save the reading for later' todo list. Once you bookmark a link the history-browsing-trajectory is lost. However once I visit a tab often it becomes a bookmark. There are extensions to organize and search bookmarks.
- avh02 9y agoyou may be a fan of tree-style tabs - used to do me well when i used to be on FF - you get a sense of how you got somewhere. I use vivaldi now - and while i have tabs on the left - i do miss tree-style features.
- proaralyst 9y agoHow do you navigate between your tabs?
- rplnt 9y agoFirefox searches through open tabs by default when you type in the address bar.
- nolok 9y agoIf you could be bothered to read the article, their approach and solution to this problem is detailed the third paragraph. If you don't bother reading, please abstain from asking question that are so clearly answered ...
- srean 9y agoYou caught me there. Nowadays I read the comments first before I read the actual post.
- jvzr 9y agoAnd you reply as well, which may the worst offense of the two. Albeit an insignificantly small offense in the grand scheme of things.
- jwilk 9y agoFrom the HN guidelines: Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article.
- teh_klev 9y ago> If you could be bothered to read the article Steady on there.. From: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
- sctb 9y agoWe detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14552088 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14552088 and marked it off-topic.
- mikeecb 9y agoOne of the reasons the Chrome browser uses one process per tab is so that memory between web-pages is isolated. By doing this, an attacker in control of a renderer process cannot read data from another renderer process (web-page). It seems like Firefox has made a security / memory tradeoff here since renderer processes can render multiple (4 by default) web-pages at a time.
- teraflop 9y agoChrome doesn't strictly follow the one-process-per-tab rule either. If you browse for a while with a bunch of tabs open, and then check Chrome's Task Manager, you'll see that it's quite common for a single process to render tabs from multiple different domains.
- oblio 9y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14549100 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14549100
- chimeracoder 9y ago> One of the reasons the Chrome browser uses one process per tab Chrome does not use a process per tab. It uses a process per domain (mostly), unless you middle click a link in which case it always shares the same process as the original tab.
- mikeecb 9y agoThey've made efforts to make it more isolated though [1]. It seems like Firefox isn't going in this direction. [1]: https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/site-isolation https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/site-is...
- bzbarsky 9y ago> It uses a process per domain (mostly) No, that's not quite right. What they do really is closer to proces-per-tab (with some complications around cross-site navigation) unless you have more than some number of tabs, in which case they will just have them share processes. See https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/process-models https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/process... and note that the default is to put multiple "independent" instances of the same site in different processes, even though they're same-domain. What you're describing is the non-default "Process-per-site" model. > unless you middle click a link in which case it always shares the same process as the original tab I believe they changed that behavior starting with Chrome 60. See https://codereview.chromium.org/2680353005/ https://codereview.chromium.org/2680353005/ which talks about ctrl-click, but I would assume (watch me turn out to be wrong!) that middle-click takes the same codepath.
- cabalamat 9y agoWhose idiot idea was it to deliberately mis-align the colours in the charts?
- flohrian 9y agothis is called design, I suppose.
- dezzeus 9y agoI've given it a try, but macOS's "activity monitor" reports a very high energy consumption, so to me it's a big no (being on a laptop). I've filled a "feedback" about that within the browser UI…
- cptskippy 9y agoThat's largely true of any browser that isn't Safari on MacOS or Edge on Windows 10.
- dezzeus 9y agoThat's sadly true, but the reported values were pretty high (~45), even when in idle (~15) with a couple of tabs. At the moment my "sweet spot" is on Opera with the "battery saver" mode.
- dingaling 9y agoWas one of the idle tabs Google search results perchance? There is some deep and dank JS on that page that makes FF loop constantly when 'idle' on that page, at least on Linux. I had to disable JS for google.com so that I could read search results without fan noise.
- gjjrfcbugxbhf 9y agostartpage.com thank me later
- dezzeus 9y agoIIRC, yes. I should check again…
- RockyMcNuts 9y agoNow it can end battery life as we know it even faster. (On Mac it pegs CPU multiple times a day and I have to kill it. Never happens with Chrome)
- jswny 9y agoThis sounds fantastic and I really can't wait to try it! However, does anyone else find themselves unable to switch away from Chrome due to the slickness? I find the overall design (and especially the design of the tabs) to be far more slick in Chrome than in Firefox. For me, the Firefox interface just feels dated and cluttered compared to the clean experience of Chrome. However, I am very wary of relying on Google for so many things so I'm absolutely going to give this new Firefox version a try.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- FnuGk 9y agoI am a long time firefox user and i feel that firefox looks better than chrome. So it might just be what you are used to. Also i am on macOS, maybe firefox doesnt look as good on your platform?
- ungzd 9y ago> In theory, moving to multiple content processes will improve stability and performance (one bad tab won't slow down the rest of your computer) So starting more processes makes other apps (not firefox) less slow? Are Arstechnica authors at least experienced PC users and know what is process, what is web browser? Do they use IE or Safari because it's default and it's an icon for internet? I wonder how high level of tech incompetence in all these tech press. Just mindless rewording of release notes every time. Also, regarding that diagram: in fact, multiple Chrome tabs can be handled by single process, you can see it in Chrome's task manager.
- majewsky 9y agoI suppose they're including the other tabs in that browser in their definition of "the rest of your computer", which seems very reasonable.