4 ms·

This is somewhat of a worry - I love Firefox and use it all the time, but it does freeze up occasionally for a few seconds. Which is acceptable in a browser, b

This is somewhat of a worry - I love Firefox and use it all the time, but it does freeze up occasionally for a few seconds. Which is acceptable in a browser, but completely useless when making phone calls.

gkanai 14y ago
That is not normal behavior. Have you tried disabling addons to see if that may be the problem? Otherwise I'd suggest trying a new profile (if you've been using Firefox for a long time. Firefox Sync can help you keep your settings as you migrate to a new profile.)
- AndrewDucker 14y ago
  It could be addons. Hard to tell, I'm running several. I haven't recreated my profile in a while, possibly time to give that a go.
  - robin_reala 14y ago
    Before you recreate your entire profile, try the new ‘reset Firefox’ button: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fix-most-problems https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fi...
  - barrkel 14y ago
    I just diagnosed and fixed a pausing issue with one of my Firefox extensions. The hard part is getting a reproducible case. But once you do, it's usually just a matter of doing a binary search through extensions, enabling and disabling half the candidates until the culprit is found. A quick verification can be to start Firefox with the -profilemanager flag and create a new profile, and verify if it does or does not occur in a completely fresh profile. In my case, pauses came from FoxyProxy regular expression pattern matching on urls where I was using: (.*\.)* to match subdomains. The issue went away when I did: (?:.*\.)? instead - non-capture, and of course noticing that . matched \. too.
bmuon 14y ago
I see that happening to Chrome as well. Freezes for seconds doing intensive hard drive work.
daeken 14y ago
So, one thing that myself and others on the team have been working on is moving things out of the main thread/process. There's a big push by the whole team to get everything working cross-process, so that we can start separate processes for each application; that should let us mitigate the problem of GC pauses and the like. One other big push is making everything off-main-thread composited. That lets the graphics work happen more or less independent of the main thread, and frees it up to do standard processing, in addition to letting animations and the like run async (much smoother). There's a lot of work still to be done, but those pauses should go away over time.
- AndrewDucker 14y ago
  That's fantastic news. I've been very impressed with the amount of improvements Firefox has been undergoing recently.
  - daeken 14y ago
    I should point out that this work is mostly specific to Boot2Gecko. A lot of it is shared with Mobile Firefox, though, and a good bit of it will probably make its way to the desktop eventually as well, but I honestly have no idea on that count (I don't work on Firefox proper).
    - AndrewDucker 14y ago
      I hadn't realised that the codebase was so different. How much code is actually shared between B2G, Mobile and Desktop?
      - daeken 14y ago
        Quite a lot. I mean, it's the same Gecko core, but there are a lot of pieces to Gecko. Mobile and B2G both use the same EGL backend for gfx, but they use different widgets and some different optimizations (e.g. we know that we have permissions for gralloc on B2G, so we don't use a tiled backend). Desktop and Mobile/B2G share the layout, JS, etc but you've got all sorts of different gfx backends that could be used. Same code, just a lot of divergent pathways.

gkanai 14y ago

That is not normal behavior. Have you tried disabling addons to see if that may be the problem? Otherwise I'd suggest trying a new profile (if you've been using Firefox for a long time. Firefox Sync can help you keep your settings as you migrate to a new profile.)

AndrewDucker 14y ago
It could be addons. Hard to tell, I'm running several. I haven't recreated my profile in a while, possibly time to give that a go.
- robin_reala 14y ago
  Before you recreate your entire profile, try the new ‘reset Firefox’ button: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fix-most-problems https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fi...
- barrkel 14y ago
  I just diagnosed and fixed a pausing issue with one of my Firefox extensions. The hard part is getting a reproducible case. But once you do, it's usually just a matter of doing a binary search through extensions, enabling and disabling half the candidates until the culprit is found. A quick verification can be to start Firefox with the -profilemanager flag and create a new profile, and verify if it does or does not occur in a completely fresh profile. In my case, pauses came from FoxyProxy regular expression pattern matching on urls where I was using: (.*\.)* to match subdomains. The issue went away when I did: (?:.*\.)? instead - non-capture, and of course noticing that . matched \. too.

bmuon 14y ago

I see that happening to Chrome as well. Freezes for seconds doing intensive hard drive work.

daeken 14y ago

So, one thing that myself and others on the team have been working on is moving things out of the main thread/process. There's a big push by the whole team to get everything working cross-process, so that we can start separate processes for each application; that should let us mitigate the problem of GC pauses and the like. One other big push is making everything off-main-thread composited. That lets the graphics work happen more or less independent of the main thread, and frees it up to do standard processing, in addition to letting animations and the like run async (much smoother). There's a lot of work still to be done, but those pauses should go away over time.

AndrewDucker 14y ago
That's fantastic news. I've been very impressed with the amount of improvements Firefox has been undergoing recently.
- daeken 14y ago
  I should point out that this work is mostly specific to Boot2Gecko. A lot of it is shared with Mobile Firefox, though, and a good bit of it will probably make its way to the desktop eventually as well, but I honestly have no idea on that count (I don't work on Firefox proper).
  - AndrewDucker 14y ago
    I hadn't realised that the codebase was so different. How much code is actually shared between B2G, Mobile and Desktop?
    - daeken 14y ago
      Quite a lot. I mean, it's the same Gecko core, but there are a lot of pieces to Gecko. Mobile and B2G both use the same EGL backend for gfx, but they use different widgets and some different optimizations (e.g. we know that we have permissions for gralloc on B2G, so we don't use a tiled backend). Desktop and Mobile/B2G share the layout, JS, etc but you've got all sorts of different gfx backends that could be used. Same code, just a lot of divergent pathways.