5 ms·

The only thing I want from Firefox is to stop freezing completely when a single tab goes crazy. It just makes the whole experience feel clunky compared to Chrom

by zimbatm 12y ago

The only thing I want from Firefox is to stop freezing completely when a single tab goes crazy. It just makes the whole experience feel clunky compared to Chrome. Usually it happens with Gmail so maybe there is a conspiracy there to drive adoption for Chrome :p

potshot 12y ago
Have you tried using multi-process tabs? http://www.ghacks.net/2014/02/13/firefoxs-multi-process-architecture/ http://www.ghacks.net/2014/02/13/firefoxs-multi-process-arch... It looks like the prefs to enable it have been shipping beyond the nightly and are in the latest release.
- kipple 12y ago
  Oo neat I didn't know this was an option for FF
  - cpeterso 12y ago
    Multi-process Firefox (aka Electrolysis or just e10s) is till under development. If you want to test it, I recommend using Firefox Nightly (34) because it has recent e10s bug fixes and its File menu has a "Open e10s Window". You can test e10s and non-e10s windows without flipping an about:config pref or restarting Firefox. You can flip the optional pref browser.tabs.remote.autostart to true to enable e10s by default, which also enables extra "shims" for add-on compatibility so more add-ons will work than with "New e10s Window".
- zimbatm 12y ago
  I didn't know about this. Hopefully it's stable. EDIT: looks fairly stable. Back to Firefox.
- mistermann 12y ago
  Do you think this might solve some of the stability (memory) issues so many people have been seeing since the last release?
kipple 12y ago
Chrome uses a separate render process for each tab[1], so when one crashes it doesn't KO the whole browser. However this also means Chrome has a larger memory footprint, since each tab is taking up the resources of a little browser. Firefox doesn't do this, and so it keeps a smaller memory footprint than Chrome (oh how times change) but the downside is--as you mentioned--the whole browser freezes if one tab fails. [1] http://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/process-models http://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/process-...
- cpeterso 12y ago
  The number of tabs per Firefox content process will, AIUI, be configurable via an about:config pref.
mburns 12y ago
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Enabling_Electrolysis https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Enabling_Electrolysis
zobzu 12y ago
tbh this happens to me more often in chrome than firefox these days.. i do get slowdowns in firefox when some tabs are loading tho. but the complete freeze in chrome is when the ui or something goes wrong, its rarely a single tab (which doesnt really happen in firefox)
Curmudgel 12y ago
Try changing the values of dom.max_script_run_time and dom.max_chrome_script_run_time in about:config to lower values so that unresponsive scripts can be killed faster.

by zimbatm 12y ago

potshot 12y ago

Have you tried using multi-process tabs? http://www.ghacks.net/2014/02/13/firefoxs-multi-process-architecture/ http://www.ghacks.net/2014/02/13/firefoxs-multi-process-arch... It looks like the prefs to enable it have been shipping beyond the nightly and are in the latest release.

kipple 12y ago
Oo neat I didn't know this was an option for FF
- cpeterso 12y ago
  Multi-process Firefox (aka Electrolysis or just e10s) is till under development. If you want to test it, I recommend using Firefox Nightly (34) because it has recent e10s bug fixes and its File menu has a "Open e10s Window". You can test e10s and non-e10s windows without flipping an about:config pref or restarting Firefox. You can flip the optional pref browser.tabs.remote.autostart to true to enable e10s by default, which also enables extra "shims" for add-on compatibility so more add-ons will work than with "New e10s Window".
zimbatm 12y ago
I didn't know about this. Hopefully it's stable. EDIT: looks fairly stable. Back to Firefox.
mistermann 12y ago
Do you think this might solve some of the stability (memory) issues so many people have been seeing since the last release?

kipple 12y ago

Chrome uses a separate render process for each tab[1], so when one crashes it doesn't KO the whole browser. However this also means Chrome has a larger memory footprint, since each tab is taking up the resources of a little browser. Firefox doesn't do this, and so it keeps a smaller memory footprint than Chrome (oh how times change) but the downside is--as you mentioned--the whole browser freezes if one tab fails. [1] http://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/process-models http://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/process-...

cpeterso 12y ago
The number of tabs per Firefox content process will, AIUI, be configurable via an about:config pref.

mburns 12y ago

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Enabling_Electrolysis https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Enabling_Electrolysis

zobzu 12y ago

tbh this happens to me more often in chrome than firefox these days.. i do get slowdowns in firefox when some tabs are loading tho. but the complete freeze in chrome is when the ui or something goes wrong, its rarely a single tab (which doesnt really happen in firefox)

Curmudgel 12y ago

Try changing the values of dom.max_script_run_time and dom.max_chrome_script_run_time in about:config to lower values so that unresponsive scripts can be killed faster.