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The killer feature in Chrome was and is the multiprocess implementation. I use Firefox for intranet browsing at work and Chrome for personal browsing: the forme

by yason 13y ago

The killer feature in Chrome was and is the multiprocess implementation. I use Firefox for intranet browsing at work and Chrome for personal browsing: the former is a sloth compared to the latter, and hangs even for seconds when loading a big page whereas Chrome will happily use as many of my 12 cores as it likes and it just doesn't even slow down. Firefox has had their comparable hack (Electrolysis?) in some prototype stage for a long time but the thing is Chrome actually delivered it... years ago. This turned the roles into a catch-up game where Firefox tries to match Chrome instead of other browsers trying to match Firefox, and the setting has remained as such since then. The difference is still astronomical and I'm not at all convinced that a new user interface could have much effect there. The browser UI has pretty much standardized 15 years ago.

batiudrami 13y ago
I tried using Chrome (from a decade+ of using Firefox) and while it is definitely faster in some instances, it is also laggier in others. Tab switching is noticably slower for me, for instance. I also found it frustrating that it would draw an unusable interface before it was done loading, which 'felt' faster, right up until I wanted to actually use it. Chrome has some good points though - its scrolling feels much better, one tab (flash) crashing doesn't take out the entire browser and I can just switch to another tab until it recovers and (obviously) Google products have much better performance. Ultimately though, its slowness in other areas, plus its inherrently broken mouse gestures, meant that I switched back to Firefox. I do wish Firefox was a bit faster moving. I know there are difficulties in dealing with a huge, old codebase, but I just wish features that Chrome has had for years, like chromeless app windows and multiprocess would just hurry up. Features like window-based private browsing took years to migrate from Chrome, and it's frustrating as you said to be perpetually caught in a game of catch up.
- epsylon 13y ago
  > one tab (flash) crashing doesn't take out the entire browser It hasn't been the case for years. Plugins are sandboxed. (plugin-container.exe) The broken mouse gestures on Chrome are the single most important dealbreaker for me. I will never go back to a browser without good mouse support (which Chrome isn't).
  - batiudrami 13y ago
    Eh, I still get lockups for whatever reason, and I have to wait 30 seconds for the browser to recover, I can't just switch tab and do other things while I'm waiting like with Chrome.
- id 13y ago
  You can disable smooth scrolling in Firefox. tools > options > advanced > general
- blueskin_ 13y ago
  Wait, you think Chrome's scrolling is better? It's not as horrible as it was at launch; I'll give it that, but it still just feels wrong compared to Firefox's.
  - batiudrami 13y ago
    This actually might be a fairly uncommon use case - I tend to scroll by clicking the middle mouse wheel and dragging down. On big, multimedia-heavy pages like The Verge (which can clock in at multiple megabytes in size), scrolling on Firefox is laggy, and on Chrome it is smooth.
    - Eupolemos 13y ago
      I personally hate how Chrome scrolls in "chunks" rather than smoothly. My FF scrolls just fine on The Verge.
      - blueskin_ 13y ago
        Mine does too. Probably performance-related; Chrome does have a tendency to waste huge amounts of memory. Smooth scrolling is nicer than jumping in my opinion, but firefox gives an option for the latter if people want it.
  - nnq 13y ago
    Designers tend to be extremely annoyed by Chrome's scrolling. I should count the time I've heard this or something similar from a designer: "but let's use css-transitions instead of free-form scrolling, it's so-much-smoother on Chrome than that ugly chunky scroll, and most of our users are on Chrome so let's just move over that ugly free-scrolling, it's so 90's anyway" (if he/she actually got the argument this far, I'm already imagining having a foot on his/her neck and driving a chair foot through his/her skull repeatedly while splashing his/her brains on the walls...) That's the most detrimental effect of Chrome's scroll I think: it makes designers want to look for alternatives to scrolling websites, and unfortunately for all of us, these "gorgeous" but completely user-hostile alternatives exist. And good luck if you get on such a website with js disabled if it wasn't coded in a gracefully degradable way...
veeti 13y ago
Electrolysis is in active development and can be tried in the nightlies.
- cpeterso 13y ago
  In the Firefox Nightly channel, you can test Electrolysis (e10s) using the "File > Open e10s Window" menu. Addon compatibility is still a work in progress, but many popular addons like Adblock Plus mostly work today.
HeavenFox 13y ago
In case you want to use Chrome for both, Chrome actually has a built-in multi-user system, so you can have two cookie jars. If your company uses Google Apps this would make even more sense.
pcwalton 13y ago
> Chrome will happily use as many of my 12 cores as it likes and it just doesn't even slow down. I spend a lot of time profiling browsers and I don't see a lot of multicore usage when browsing in current engines. Usually layout and painting is happening for one page at the time—the tab you're looking on—and multicore performance for them is really poor in current engines. I have not seen browsers saturate 12 cores. For example, go to [1] in your browser: no browser engine saturates maybe more than a core and a half as it chugs along struggling to reflow. I think that Chrome- (and IE-)style per-domain process-based parallelism provides some benefits, but mainly in getting stuff like Gmail and Facebook notifications off the main thread, not really in improving throughput. [1]: http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/master/single-page.html http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/master/single-page.htm...
- rcthompson 13y ago
  I think the main benefit of the multiprocess model is not increased performance on any one website. It is that when a website in one tab decides to calculate pi to a trillion digits, it doesn't bring down the whole browser and all the other tabs along with it.
  - pcwalton 13y ago
    Sure, I agree with that statement. It doesn't square with how I read "Chrome will happily use as many of my 12 cores as it likes", however.
    - rcthompson 13y ago
      I read that phrase as "I open as many tabs as I want and Chrome renders them all on different cores." I guess I got that partially from the subsequent mention of Electrolysis as a comparable effort.
  - acjohnson55 13y ago
    Although, does Firefox not use separate threads for each tab? If so, then it would seem like in normal operation, it should be possible to achieve parallelism. Of course, I do still see whole-browser lockups in Firefox, and what I really miss is the ability to actually diagnose misbehaving tabs. Also, I think the Chrome debugger has surpassed Firefox's, especially with the experimental stack traces in asynchronous flows of control.
rplnt 13y ago
This is not an issue of the design. Opera (<=12), a single process browser, had much better performance than Firefox. Biggest problem with Chrome I see (performance-wise) is that tabs that weren't in use for a while take quite some time to load. My guess would be their memory gets swapped out. I don't know how Opera did it, but switch to any of ~hundred opened tabs is instantaneous.
- taspeotis 13y ago
  Whether Opera does it or not I don't know, but in Windows at least you can lock pages in physical memory [1]. It's not really a good general purpose technique, however. [1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa366895(v=vs.85).aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa36...
chacham15 13y ago
Am I the only one that doesnt like this "feature"? The reason I dont like it is because now, instead of being limited to 25% of my total CPU usage, at times Chrome happily pins all four of my cores. Granted that this is probably a result of poor plugin/webpage interaction (although, I havent been able to determine what combination...being a heisenbug and all), in Firefox, the worst case is still 25% maximum CPU usage.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- vesinisa 13y ago
  If you have four cores and really want so that Chrome can only use one of them at a time you can just start it with taskset -c 0 google-chrome or maybe better taskset -c 0-2 google-chrome which will allocate cores 0-2 to Chrome, dedicating one core for your other work.
- blueskin_ 13y ago
  Nice it or pin it to a specific set of cores. I have to agree, I hate it when a fscking browser decides to grab all the system resources it can, messing with anything else I'm running.
- exodust 13y ago
  You're not the only one. I can't remember the last time Firefox crashed on me. I fill those tabs up real good. It does a fine job on both my medium-spec work computer and high spec home gaming PC! Chrome isn't for me, it's one-core-per-tab thing is not something I need or want. I hate the idea of the browser using too much system resources, I prefer how Firefox does it.
zobzu 13y ago
I'm very suspicious about this astronomical performance difference you're talking about. Like many I run both firefox and chrome all day long. I literally cannot tell which one is faster. Firefox does use all the cores like Chrome does btw - it's called multithreading - and both of them seem to do approximately an equal okay-ish job at it (maybe servo does a much better job but thats not useable yet). The only times where as a user i can see chrome multiprocess model shines is: - sec vulns where chrome sandbox is not bypassed - stuff actually crashing or hanging Needless to say both cases are quite rare on either browser (and when flash hangs in firefox, it does for a few seconds before firefox proposes to kill it - while in chrome it only hangs the current tab) Note also that: - electrolysis can be enabled right now by an about:config option - i run firefox and chromium on linux - i guess your mileage may vary on other platforms (?)
- fragmede 13y ago
  Curious - do you run ad-block or any other blocking-type add-ons? On my system, there's a noticeable speed difference between Firefox and Chrome, especially if I disable ad-block in Firefox. (Also on Linux.)
  - seba_dos1 13y ago
    AdBlock slows down the browser. I recommend Privoxy.
  - zobzu 13y ago
    i use adblock edge on firefox and adblock+yt adblock on chrome
- itry 13y ago
  When I do calculations in the browser, opening a second window halves the performance in the first window in FF. In Chrome the performance stays the same.
tn13 13y ago
I do not think there is such difference in FF and CR performance. Both browsers are relatively close. Firefox however hangs in some common cases where as Chrome handles general cases better. CR however is worse when it comes to multi-tab browsing with over 20 tabs!
- slacka 13y ago
  Yes, with just a few tabs open Chrome's multi-process architecture shines at cost of being a memory hog. As a result Chrome starts thrashing long before FF. FF 8-13 really shined in memory usage. Unfortunately even by their own internal benchmarks, it's gone downhill since since 13. https://areweslimyet.com/ https://areweslimyet.com/
blueskin_ 13y ago
Killer feature in that it kills your free RAM? Firefox with 200 tabs can be 1GB or so; chrome with the same load is about 4GB.
- runeks 13y ago
  4 GB RAM is like $35. To me, this trade-off (memory for speed) seems like the logical one.
  - blueskin_ 13y ago
    Works up until you already have 16GB and can't fit any more in your mobo.
    - runeks 13y ago
      I just tried opening 30 YouTube videos with 15 additional HTML (non-Flash) tabs. My system used 6 GB of RAM (Linux 64 bit). So unless you're watching 100 YouTube videos at a time, or have more than 200 tabs open at a time, I really don't see how that's a problem.
      - userbinator 13y ago
        You're ignoring the fact that many users have applications other than a browser open, and that those applications also consume memory. Start hitting the swapfile and any performance advantage disappears. It is in the best interest of everyone to make applications use less memory, since all the applications (and the OS) have to share what the system has.
        runeks 13y ago
        > It is in the best interest of everyone to make applications use less memory, since all the applications (and the OS) have to share what the system has. There is always a trade-off between speed and memory usage. For my use cases, I prefer this particular trade-off for a browser. I realize you might not have the same preference.
davidgerard 13y ago
Big problem with Firefox: it doesn't vacuum places.sqlite. You can work around this (a) vacuuming it by hand or (b) just deleting it (losing all your visited links). I did this and Firefox is suddenly as fast as Chromium. (Xubuntu 14.04, 4GB RAM.)
- Excavator 13y ago
  You're using a 4+ years old version of Firefox? https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=512854 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=512854
  - davidgerard 13y ago
    FF 28.0 in the Ubuntu 14.04 repo, now on FF 29.0. So, no, this is a current problem.
dblohm7 13y ago
It's a lot easier to implement multiprocess when you're building a brand new product without a decade-plus old add-on and plugin ecosystem that you need to support.

by yason 13y ago

batiudrami 13y ago

I tried using Chrome (from a decade+ of using Firefox) and while it is definitely faster in some instances, it is also laggier in others. Tab switching is noticably slower for me, for instance. I also found it frustrating that it would draw an unusable interface before it was done loading, which 'felt' faster, right up until I wanted to actually use it. Chrome has some good points though - its scrolling feels much better, one tab (flash) crashing doesn't take out the entire browser and I can just switch to another tab until it recovers and (obviously) Google products have much better performance. Ultimately though, its slowness in other areas, plus its inherrently broken mouse gestures, meant that I switched back to Firefox. I do wish Firefox was a bit faster moving. I know there are difficulties in dealing with a huge, old codebase, but I just wish features that Chrome has had for years, like chromeless app windows and multiprocess would just hurry up. Features like window-based private browsing took years to migrate from Chrome, and it's frustrating as you said to be perpetually caught in a game of catch up.

epsylon 13y ago
> one tab (flash) crashing doesn't take out the entire browser It hasn't been the case for years. Plugins are sandboxed. (plugin-container.exe) The broken mouse gestures on Chrome are the single most important dealbreaker for me. I will never go back to a browser without good mouse support (which Chrome isn't).
- batiudrami 13y ago
  Eh, I still get lockups for whatever reason, and I have to wait 30 seconds for the browser to recover, I can't just switch tab and do other things while I'm waiting like with Chrome.
id 13y ago
You can disable smooth scrolling in Firefox. tools > options > advanced > general
blueskin_ 13y ago
Wait, you think Chrome's scrolling is better? It's not as horrible as it was at launch; I'll give it that, but it still just feels wrong compared to Firefox's.
- batiudrami 13y ago
  This actually might be a fairly uncommon use case - I tend to scroll by clicking the middle mouse wheel and dragging down. On big, multimedia-heavy pages like The Verge (which can clock in at multiple megabytes in size), scrolling on Firefox is laggy, and on Chrome it is smooth.
  - Eupolemos 13y ago
    I personally hate how Chrome scrolls in "chunks" rather than smoothly. My FF scrolls just fine on The Verge.
    - blueskin_ 13y ago
      Mine does too. Probably performance-related; Chrome does have a tendency to waste huge amounts of memory. Smooth scrolling is nicer than jumping in my opinion, but firefox gives an option for the latter if people want it.
- nnq 13y ago
  Designers tend to be extremely annoyed by Chrome's scrolling. I should count the time I've heard this or something similar from a designer: "but let's use css-transitions instead of free-form scrolling, it's so-much-smoother on Chrome than that ugly chunky scroll, and most of our users are on Chrome so let's just move over that ugly free-scrolling, it's so 90's anyway" (if he/she actually got the argument this far, I'm already imagining having a foot on his/her neck and driving a chair foot through his/her skull repeatedly while splashing his/her brains on the walls...) That's the most detrimental effect of Chrome's scroll I think: it makes designers want to look for alternatives to scrolling websites, and unfortunately for all of us, these "gorgeous" but completely user-hostile alternatives exist. And good luck if you get on such a website with js disabled if it wasn't coded in a gracefully degradable way...

veeti 13y ago

Electrolysis is in active development and can be tried in the nightlies.

cpeterso 13y ago
In the Firefox Nightly channel, you can test Electrolysis (e10s) using the "File > Open e10s Window" menu. Addon compatibility is still a work in progress, but many popular addons like Adblock Plus mostly work today.

HeavenFox 13y ago

In case you want to use Chrome for both, Chrome actually has a built-in multi-user system, so you can have two cookie jars. If your company uses Google Apps this would make even more sense.

pcwalton 13y ago

> Chrome will happily use as many of my 12 cores as it likes and it just doesn't even slow down. I spend a lot of time profiling browsers and I don't see a lot of multicore usage when browsing in current engines. Usually layout and painting is happening for one page at the time—the tab you're looking on—and multicore performance for them is really poor in current engines. I have not seen browsers saturate 12 cores. For example, go to [1] in your browser: no browser engine saturates maybe more than a core and a half as it chugs along struggling to reflow. I think that Chrome- (and IE-)style per-domain process-based parallelism provides some benefits, but mainly in getting stuff like Gmail and Facebook notifications off the main thread, not really in improving throughput. [1]: http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/master/single-page.html http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/master/single-page.htm...

rcthompson 13y ago
I think the main benefit of the multiprocess model is not increased performance on any one website. It is that when a website in one tab decides to calculate pi to a trillion digits, it doesn't bring down the whole browser and all the other tabs along with it.
- pcwalton 13y ago
  Sure, I agree with that statement. It doesn't square with how I read "Chrome will happily use as many of my 12 cores as it likes", however.
  - rcthompson 13y ago
    I read that phrase as "I open as many tabs as I want and Chrome renders them all on different cores." I guess I got that partially from the subsequent mention of Electrolysis as a comparable effort.
- acjohnson55 13y ago
  Although, does Firefox not use separate threads for each tab? If so, then it would seem like in normal operation, it should be possible to achieve parallelism. Of course, I do still see whole-browser lockups in Firefox, and what I really miss is the ability to actually diagnose misbehaving tabs. Also, I think the Chrome debugger has surpassed Firefox's, especially with the experimental stack traces in asynchronous flows of control.

rplnt 13y ago

This is not an issue of the design. Opera (<=12), a single process browser, had much better performance than Firefox. Biggest problem with Chrome I see (performance-wise) is that tabs that weren't in use for a while take quite some time to load. My guess would be their memory gets swapped out. I don't know how Opera did it, but switch to any of ~hundred opened tabs is instantaneous.

taspeotis 13y ago
Whether Opera does it or not I don't know, but in Windows at least you can lock pages in physical memory [1]. It's not really a good general purpose technique, however. [1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa366895(v=vs.85).aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa36...

chacham15 13y ago

Am I the only one that doesnt like this "feature"? The reason I dont like it is because now, instead of being limited to 25% of my total CPU usage, at times Chrome happily pins all four of my cores. Granted that this is probably a result of poor plugin/webpage interaction (although, I havent been able to determine what combination...being a heisenbug and all), in Firefox, the worst case is still 25% maximum CPU usage.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
vesinisa 13y ago
If you have four cores and really want so that Chrome can only use one of them at a time you can just start it with taskset -c 0 google-chrome or maybe better taskset -c 0-2 google-chrome which will allocate cores 0-2 to Chrome, dedicating one core for your other work.
blueskin_ 13y ago
Nice it or pin it to a specific set of cores. I have to agree, I hate it when a fscking browser decides to grab all the system resources it can, messing with anything else I'm running.
exodust 13y ago
You're not the only one. I can't remember the last time Firefox crashed on me. I fill those tabs up real good. It does a fine job on both my medium-spec work computer and high spec home gaming PC! Chrome isn't for me, it's one-core-per-tab thing is not something I need or want. I hate the idea of the browser using too much system resources, I prefer how Firefox does it.

zobzu 13y ago

I'm very suspicious about this astronomical performance difference you're talking about. Like many I run both firefox and chrome all day long. I literally cannot tell which one is faster. Firefox does use all the cores like Chrome does btw - it's called multithreading - and both of them seem to do approximately an equal okay-ish job at it (maybe servo does a much better job but thats not useable yet). The only times where as a user i can see chrome multiprocess model shines is: - sec vulns where chrome sandbox is not bypassed - stuff actually crashing or hanging Needless to say both cases are quite rare on either browser (and when flash hangs in firefox, it does for a few seconds before firefox proposes to kill it - while in chrome it only hangs the current tab) Note also that: - electrolysis can be enabled right now by an about:config option - i run firefox and chromium on linux - i guess your mileage may vary on other platforms (?)

fragmede 13y ago
Curious - do you run ad-block or any other blocking-type add-ons? On my system, there's a noticeable speed difference between Firefox and Chrome, especially if I disable ad-block in Firefox. (Also on Linux.)
- seba_dos1 13y ago
  AdBlock slows down the browser. I recommend Privoxy.
- zobzu 13y ago
  i use adblock edge on firefox and adblock+yt adblock on chrome
itry 13y ago
When I do calculations in the browser, opening a second window halves the performance in the first window in FF. In Chrome the performance stays the same.

tn13 13y ago

I do not think there is such difference in FF and CR performance. Both browsers are relatively close. Firefox however hangs in some common cases where as Chrome handles general cases better. CR however is worse when it comes to multi-tab browsing with over 20 tabs!

slacka 13y ago
Yes, with just a few tabs open Chrome's multi-process architecture shines at cost of being a memory hog. As a result Chrome starts thrashing long before FF. FF 8-13 really shined in memory usage. Unfortunately even by their own internal benchmarks, it's gone downhill since since 13. https://areweslimyet.com/ https://areweslimyet.com/

blueskin_ 13y ago

Killer feature in that it kills your free RAM? Firefox with 200 tabs can be 1GB or so; chrome with the same load is about 4GB.

runeks 13y ago
4 GB RAM is like $35. To me, this trade-off (memory for speed) seems like the logical one.
- blueskin_ 13y ago
  Works up until you already have 16GB and can't fit any more in your mobo.
  - runeks 13y ago
    I just tried opening 30 YouTube videos with 15 additional HTML (non-Flash) tabs. My system used 6 GB of RAM (Linux 64 bit). So unless you're watching 100 YouTube videos at a time, or have more than 200 tabs open at a time, I really don't see how that's a problem.
    - userbinator 13y ago
      You're ignoring the fact that many users have applications other than a browser open, and that those applications also consume memory. Start hitting the swapfile and any performance advantage disappears. It is in the best interest of everyone to make applications use less memory, since all the applications (and the OS) have to share what the system has.
      - runeks 13y ago
        > It is in the best interest of everyone to make applications use less memory, since all the applications (and the OS) have to share what the system has. There is always a trade-off between speed and memory usage. For my use cases, I prefer this particular trade-off for a browser. I realize you might not have the same preference.

davidgerard 13y ago

Big problem with Firefox: it doesn't vacuum places.sqlite. You can work around this (a) vacuuming it by hand or (b) just deleting it (losing all your visited links). I did this and Firefox is suddenly as fast as Chromium. (Xubuntu 14.04, 4GB RAM.)

Excavator 13y ago
You're using a 4+ years old version of Firefox? https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=512854 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=512854
- davidgerard 13y ago
  FF 28.0 in the Ubuntu 14.04 repo, now on FF 29.0. So, no, this is a current problem.

dblohm7 13y ago

It's a lot easier to implement multiprocess when you're building a brand new product without a decade-plus old add-on and plugin ecosystem that you need to support.