4 ms·

> There isn't a feature in Chromium or Google Chrome that Firefox doesn't deliver. Multi-process browsing. It is incredibly annoying when my entire browser loc

by nandhp 12y ago

> There isn't a feature in Chromium or Google Chrome that Firefox doesn't deliver. Multi-process browsing. It is incredibly annoying when my entire browser locks up because one of the fifty tabs I have open is doing something stupid. That never happened in several years of using Chrome, and it happens several times a day in Firefox.

hbt 12y ago
Agreed. The multi-process vs single process is controversial. With cheap memory, multi-process would be better. However, I personally don't experience crashes several times a day. A crash usually boils down to Javascript taking too long and/or maybe rendering issues with CSS (hardware acceleration). However Chrome is not immune to bad JS and will also slow down your system until the single tab is killed/crashes. Overall, a crash is not really that dramatic. The browser restarts, all tabs are still there and only load if you click them, you can use Lazarus to auto-save all form inputs and not lose a single point of data and it resumes at the exact position in seconds (no need to scroll either). Just add NoScript and block the sites where developers can't write decent JS. >> it happens several times a day in Firefox If it happens frequently regardless of the sites you're visiting then it must be extensions or hardware acceleration or plugins. i.e a configuration problem and not a FF one
- Amadiro 12y ago
  > Chrome is not immune to bad JS and will also slow down your system until the single tab is killed/crashes. That's true, but with like 8-or-so cores I don't really care or even notice that much (if I notice some tab is eating a lot of CPU power, I just go into the task-manager and kill it, until I need it, at which point I reload it.) No disruption to my browsing experience happens. In firefox, I'll have to close the tab, possibly restart the browser, et cetera. > The browser restarts, all tabs are still there and only load if you click them I haven't really used firefox for a while now, but it used to lose tabs occasionally for me. I hope that's fixed nowadays.
CyberShadow 12y ago
For the record, Mozilla is working on it: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis You can track the E10s team's progress through their weekly meeting notes: https://etherpad.mozilla.org/E10s-meeting-notes https://etherpad.mozilla.org/E10s-meeting-notes
- azakai 12y ago
  You can also try it right now on Nightly builds. There's even a menu option ("open new e10s window").
  - rb12345 12y ago
    You can enable it in Firefox 29 if you like (about:config, browser.tabs.remote=true, restart). I noticed though that navigating to live bookmarks crashed the browser, so ended up disabling it.
sentenza 12y ago
So imagine you are a person that stopped browser hygiene during a few months while finishing their PhD and now _still_ carries around about 900 open tabs waiting to be sorted into bookmarks and junk. (Yeah, that's me.) I have to re-start Firefox every 48 hours or else its resource consumption starts affecting the overall system. This is my primary issue with current Firefox versions, although I am aware that I'm an n-sigma outlier. Intrestingly, however, the Firefox team has been greatly improving memory management, so that currently, even with my completely pathological browser session, Firefox remains usable for 48 hours with 900 tabs open.
- mnemonik 12y ago
  You might like the unload tab addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/unloadtab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/unloadtab/
- CyberShadow 12y ago
  Right-click the tab bar, select "Bookmark all tabs", save them all to a new folder (name it after the current date or whatnot).
  - lomnakkus 12y ago
    Or just close all those tabs. Realistically you're never actually going to get around to reading them and they're just there weighing you down. Seriously, close them. Forget they were ever there. If you haven't looked at them yet it means that they're not that important!
    - lelandbatey 12y ago
      Yeah, this is the only way I keep my browsing sane. Over the years, a kind of "tab garbage-collection" habit has emerged. I find it works really well, since if a tab hasn't been visited in the last 20 minutes, I probably won't open it again. Additionally, the history-tracking of the browser is good enough and my google-fu sufficient so I can find anything I need that I've previously visited. Keeping my tabs lean makes me much happier!
andreastt 12y ago
So Firefox does support multi-processed tabs through Electrolysis (its IPC layer). From what I understand this is used primarily on Firefox OS to sandbox app runtimes. Doing one process per tab, which is what Chrome does, comes at a very steep cost in increased memory usage. If you compare a Chrome and Firefox instance holding 20 or 30 tabs, the memory consumption is going to be dramatically different. Bill McCloskey did a nice writeup on this back in December: http://billmccloskey.wordpress.com/2013/12/05/multiprocess-firefox/ http://billmccloskey.wordpress.com/2013/12/05/multiprocess-f... His article explains how you can try out the experimental multi-process support in Firefox, but that it works differently to Chrome's. I think Chrome's way of doing it wastes a lot of system resources and that we need to be more clever about how we spend a user's system resources.
mburns 12y ago
You can turn it on in Firefox Nightly. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Enabling_Electrolysis https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Enabling_Electrolysis

by nandhp 12y ago

hbt 12y ago

Agreed. The multi-process vs single process is controversial. With cheap memory, multi-process would be better. However, I personally don't experience crashes several times a day. A crash usually boils down to Javascript taking too long and/or maybe rendering issues with CSS (hardware acceleration). However Chrome is not immune to bad JS and will also slow down your system until the single tab is killed/crashes. Overall, a crash is not really that dramatic. The browser restarts, all tabs are still there and only load if you click them, you can use Lazarus to auto-save all form inputs and not lose a single point of data and it resumes at the exact position in seconds (no need to scroll either). Just add NoScript and block the sites where developers can't write decent JS. >> it happens several times a day in Firefox If it happens frequently regardless of the sites you're visiting then it must be extensions or hardware acceleration or plugins. i.e a configuration problem and not a FF one

Amadiro 12y ago
> Chrome is not immune to bad JS and will also slow down your system until the single tab is killed/crashes. That's true, but with like 8-or-so cores I don't really care or even notice that much (if I notice some tab is eating a lot of CPU power, I just go into the task-manager and kill it, until I need it, at which point I reload it.) No disruption to my browsing experience happens. In firefox, I'll have to close the tab, possibly restart the browser, et cetera. > The browser restarts, all tabs are still there and only load if you click them I haven't really used firefox for a while now, but it used to lose tabs occasionally for me. I hope that's fixed nowadays.

CyberShadow 12y ago

For the record, Mozilla is working on it: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis You can track the E10s team's progress through their weekly meeting notes: https://etherpad.mozilla.org/E10s-meeting-notes https://etherpad.mozilla.org/E10s-meeting-notes

azakai 12y ago
You can also try it right now on Nightly builds. There's even a menu option ("open new e10s window").
- rb12345 12y ago
  You can enable it in Firefox 29 if you like (about:config, browser.tabs.remote=true, restart). I noticed though that navigating to live bookmarks crashed the browser, so ended up disabling it.

sentenza 12y ago

So imagine you are a person that stopped browser hygiene during a few months while finishing their PhD and now _still_ carries around about 900 open tabs waiting to be sorted into bookmarks and junk. (Yeah, that's me.) I have to re-start Firefox every 48 hours or else its resource consumption starts affecting the overall system. This is my primary issue with current Firefox versions, although I am aware that I'm an n-sigma outlier. Intrestingly, however, the Firefox team has been greatly improving memory management, so that currently, even with my completely pathological browser session, Firefox remains usable for 48 hours with 900 tabs open.

mnemonik 12y ago
You might like the unload tab addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/unloadtab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/unloadtab/
CyberShadow 12y ago
Right-click the tab bar, select "Bookmark all tabs", save them all to a new folder (name it after the current date or whatnot).
- lomnakkus 12y ago
  Or just close all those tabs. Realistically you're never actually going to get around to reading them and they're just there weighing you down. Seriously, close them. Forget they were ever there. If you haven't looked at them yet it means that they're not that important!
  - lelandbatey 12y ago
    Yeah, this is the only way I keep my browsing sane. Over the years, a kind of "tab garbage-collection" habit has emerged. I find it works really well, since if a tab hasn't been visited in the last 20 minutes, I probably won't open it again. Additionally, the history-tracking of the browser is good enough and my google-fu sufficient so I can find anything I need that I've previously visited. Keeping my tabs lean makes me much happier!

andreastt 12y ago

So Firefox does support multi-processed tabs through Electrolysis (its IPC layer). From what I understand this is used primarily on Firefox OS to sandbox app runtimes. Doing one process per tab, which is what Chrome does, comes at a very steep cost in increased memory usage. If you compare a Chrome and Firefox instance holding 20 or 30 tabs, the memory consumption is going to be dramatically different. Bill McCloskey did a nice writeup on this back in December: http://billmccloskey.wordpress.com/2013/12/05/multiprocess-firefox/ http://billmccloskey.wordpress.com/2013/12/05/multiprocess-f... His article explains how you can try out the experimental multi-process support in Firefox, but that it works differently to Chrome's. I think Chrome's way of doing it wastes a lot of system resources and that we need to be more clever about how we spend a user's system resources.

mburns 12y ago

You can turn it on in Firefox Nightly. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Enabling_Electrolysis https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Enabling_Electrolysis