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Firefox Finally Confirms 'Largest Change Ever' Featuring Electrolysis In v48 (zdnet.com)
Firefox is finally getting multi-process support. Mozilla has announced that Electrolysis (e10s) will be available to users starting Firefox 48. The foundation finds it the most significant Firefox change since the browser's inception. From a ZDNet report: With Electrolysis, Firefox can use child processes for content (tabs), media playback and legacy plug-ins. This is some way short of Google Chrome, which uses a different process for each tab. However, the result is that Chrome is a huge resource hog: Chrome uses roughly twice as much memory as Firefox on Windows and Linux. Eric Rahm has run some browser tests with Electrolysis, and says: "Overall we see a 10-20 percent increase in memory usage for the 1 content process case (which is what we plan on shipping initially). This seems like a fair trade-off for potential security and performance benefits." With 8 content processes, Rahm says: "we see roughly a doubling of memory usage on the TabsOpenSettled measurement. It's a bit worse on Windows, a bit better on OS X, but it's not 8 times worse."The aforementioned feature will be available in Firefox 48 Beta shortly.
Performance is the least of their problems. Security, first.
IE says hello 2008.
You can call Chrome a resource hog all you want, but I run both FF and Chrome on my work PC, to easily handle being logged into a couple different accounts on a website, and I can say hands down that Chrome is much more responsive. Trying to move windows or tabs around in FF is just a drag (get it!), it freezes up much more, and just feels sluggish.
Maybe Mozilla should get a clue and start tapping more resources to make their browser function well.
They really should get details in relation to other browsers instead of to its own in this case.
I'd like to drop Chrome if tabs will not stall out the entire browser or cause it to crash.
I'm hoping for a follow up to this story on /. a week after release telling me it was released, with the correct metrics in the summary to judge if I should pay attention or not. I'd give it 10:1 for at a weeks time. 3:1 for at three days.
Gosh... I've got 16Gb of RAM on my PC 6 of which is never used.
Please use my memory and give me more thread... please.
Firefox is such a performance dog and they are trying to sell small footprint?
Sorry- I think Firefox is a hideous browser.
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
"I am using Firefox Dev Edition with Electrolysis enabled from many months and it looks almost stable now. I dont know if anyone noticed this but the CPU and memory usage reduced drastically with increasing number of tabs (I have about 40 open tabs) with e10 enabled. And with this, Firefox uses lot less resources than Chrome on my system with multiple tabs."
https://asadotzler.com/2016/06...
New things are always on the horizon
been dealing with this as a nightly user and have turned off E10s - Though NoScript mostly works now, I have other extensions that have stopped. Unfortunately, at least one of them does not look to be too actively supported anymore. It is also not certain that E10s provides much more than easier recovery, the performance figures I have heard are not that great though I personally did not notice any slow down (or speed up).
Ever seen a firefox after electrolysis? Well, me neither. But I bet it's not pretty.
After being a diehard FF users since it came out I dumped it a few months ago in favour of Chrome. Am on OSX and FF, by the time I added a few reasonable security plugins would, after a day of not killing the app, have a process footprint of 100%. Often it would hit 80% and stay there with little more than 3-5 tabs. It's a ridiculous hog. Chrome, same plug-ins, currently have 12 tabs open, and it's only using 14% of my processor. By the time they fix all the issues at hand I suspect I'll be too old to remember their name.
Where did they get a name like "Electrolysis"? As a chemist, I tend to think of electrolysis meaning something a lot different that the FF folks do. And as a layman I tend to think of electrolysis as a technique for removing unwanted hair. So they name some code after a hair removal technique. I guess the long list of "names for things" is finally getting exhausted.
I've always wanted a web browser that can also get rid of unwanted hair.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
What worries me the most is how this feature could very well spell the end of Firefox if users run into problems with it.
The latest web browser market share stats show Firefox at only about 6% to 7% of the market. That puts Firefox, across all platforms both mobile and desktop, well below Chrome, and around where individual versions of other browsers like Safari for iOS and IE are at.
So Firefox has no leeway at this time. Mozilla really can't afford to lose any more Firefox users than they've already lost.
Electrolysis hasn't exactly been a smooth project. It goes back many years, and my understanding is that they actually halted/delayed the project at one point, before restarting it. Its release has been pushed back again and again and again.
There have been cases in the past where Firefox changes have not gone well, and this has resulted in even more users leaving than who would've likely left had there not been problems.
For example, around the Firefox 4 era, when they switched to their new versioning scheme and rapid releases, many extensions were broken with each new release. This caused untold problems for Firefox users. Many of them moved to Chrome or other browsers at this point. By the time the Firefox devs got their acts together, it was too late; these users would never again use Firefox.
We saw something similar happen with Australis. Despite widespread dislike from the Firefox community at the time, Australis was pushed on all Firefox users. This was a painful transition for many. In some sense it proved to many that Firefox as they knew it was long dead; Firefox was now just a bad imitation of Chrome. Many Firefox users, when faced with the choice of using a poor imitation of Chrome (i.e. Firefox) or Chrome itself, just chose the lesser of two evils and used Chrome directly. Even if its UI is shitty, at least it's faster than Firefox.
If Electrolysis ends up breaking extensions for a lot of Firefox users, or if it ends up slowing down Firefox even more for them, I think we may see yet another mass exodus away from Firefox to Chrome and other browsers. That could very well take Firefox from being irrelevant to being completely irrelevant. Nobody will care about Firefox when it has only 2% or even 3% of the browser market. Web developers won't test with it, and sites won't work with it. Search engine providers won't sign deals with Mozilla if Firefox has few users.
The only thing that might be more devastating would be the extension signing changes that the Firefox developers have talked about.
I really don't want Firefox to become irrelevant, but I'm getting an awful feeling in my gut that that's exactly what we'll see when the Electrolysis rollout ends up being a major disaster for a lot of Firefox users. This could very well be what finally pushes them over the edge and to other browsers, meaning that Firefox would become irrelevant.
...it's got electrolytes!
Was not it only, what, 20 years ago, when multi-threading was all the rage, and the OSes, that didn't offer it, were ridiculed?
Can't wait for aout to come back and take over ELF again...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
You can write the rendering engine in BASIC for all I care, just quit fucking with the UI.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I wonder why Mozilla has search a hard time understanding that the main draw of their browser is its extensions. Making sure they remain stable should be the #1 priority...at least, it should be higher up than introducing 'features' no one cares about. If Chromium had decent noscript and pentadactyl equivalents, I'd switch and never look back.
Version 48 of the FF, this means they are by now finally 8 times better than IE6?
I just wish they'd stop breaking pentadactyl
This is stupid, I usually run 1-2gb on memory in Firefox. Now that's going to be 4gb+ I hope I can turn this feature off. Since Firefox and chrome don't care about resources, it doesn't matter which browser I use
not going to happen, because: Cell Phones, Chromebooks, Firefoxbooks only have 2GB-4GB of ram
Not relevant on my PC or my Mac. I'm typing this on a PC with 24GB of RAM and my Mac at home has 16GB. As long as it doesn't consume memory needed by other applications I don't mind at all if it uses lots of RAM to improve performance. If the machine has less RAM then adjust accordingly.
Actually, they have. But ensure the extensions you are running are not leaking memory themselves.
Can we stop this copy/paste garbage on every article that mentions web browsers? The "facts" aren't even true, and have never been true. It's a gigantic waste of time.
To the idiots that mod this SPAM up without giving it a moment's consideration: Stop it.
The story is that Mozilla can change your settings without your knowledge or permission, per Asa's blog: https://asadotzler.com/2016/06/06/firefox-48-beta-release-and-e10s/
It starts out simple enough, with some A-B testing:
"This is a huge change for Firefox, the largest we’ve ever shipped. roll-out plan that ensures we’re going slowly, measuring as we go and that we can throttle up as well as down depending on what we see.
Here’s what that looks like. When we launch Firefox 48, approximately 1% of eligible Firefox users will get updated to E10S immediately."
This first statement might imply that they are A-B testing at the installer level, choosing what to install for you. They might be planning on enabling it for everyone in 6 weeks... oh, wait... no:
"If we run into issues, we can slow the roll-out, pause it, or even disable E10sS for those who got it. We have all the knobs." (bolding mine)
It's clear that they have access to settings and can override user settings when and as they wish. One might suggest preventing firefox from having network access, but of course that is ridiculous. Instead, we are giving up control of our system to an unknown someone. What if Mozilla was to be hacked? What would prevent someone pushing down some risky settings? I'm not even sure of the risks. But once I hear someone say they have all the knobs to enable and disable settings, it makes me worry about security.
That IS a priority! Why the hell do you think they're putting out a new extension API? For fun? NO! Old extensions broke all the time due to the way the hooks were implemented. That's why the old extension API was a continuously moving target. The new API is intended to be *stable* so that extensions don't break when they update the browser.
Will it be good? You bet! They start with an API similar to Chromes, to make porting extensions between browsers easier (That's a good thing). From there, they build it out to give it all the power and flexibility we've come to expect from FireFox extensions. They're even working directly with the authors of popular extentions like NoScript to ensure that users and developers won't miss out.
Perhaps you should spend less time bitching and moaning about what you Imagine to be true and spend a bit more time learning what is actually true. While your at it, you could stop spreading bullshit all over the internet.
Hardware resources are free. There's barely a machine out there that has less than 8GB of RAM anymore. That Firefox has yet to take advantage of seemingly unlimited resources yet is just astounding. They pay far too close attention to the "OMGz Memory Leakz!" cult and not enough attention to real-world users.
Yes. Eons ago. The culprit is more likely than not your extensions, which are not audited by Mozilla to ensure they are written to any acceptable programming standard. Try uninstalling your "OMGz Couponz Printerz" extension and see if that helps.
I always wanted to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen with a browser!!!
Firefox has had memory leaks under control for a long time. Regressions ebb and flow with releases but almost surely what you are calling a Firefox memory leak is not an actual memory leak. I'd say more than half of users who talk about memory leaks don't know the difference between a memory leak and large memory footprint.
A web browser can communicate with The Internet?? The horror!
This is going to require a full rewrite for me and just about everybody. If they are going to do this I wish they'd at least wait until they had compatibility with Chrome so I could leverage the work I'm doing there. Rewriting an app for a mulitthreaded environment is a nightmare of interlocking callbacks...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Everytime a Firefox story comes up there is the same old complaints. And Pale Moon and Seamonkey have their own problems.
I'm already losing enough hair on my head. I don't need a browser that accelerates it!
No they haven't. They've fixed some memory issues but not all of them. Go open 2000 random tabs (how about porn pics and videos?), and close 1000 of them. Half of your memory isn't restored. Close all but one tab. Your memory usage will be in the multi-gigabyte range for 1 tab and maybe 10 cached to undo their closing. Go to about:memory and do some cleans. You don't get the memory back. Open another 2300 and restart the browser. It takes 8 MINUTES for it to restart. These aren't active tabs, when you restart the tabs aren't loaded until you click on them. Somehow 2300 web page tab names, 2300 tab ids, and 2300 site icon lookups take 8 minutes and the browser is completely unresponsive while loading. It can't even draw itself. WTF? They don't need to be loading any more than that until you click on one of the tabs. Firefox is very bloated and the only thing it has going for it is the other browsers are even more so. Not many people use hundreds or thousands of tabs, but trying it shows a browser's underlying design flaws.
I don't understand why browsers don't increase their security so you don't need process isolation and then run everything through thread pools. Changing and rendering GUI elements under an event-based design would keep the UI functional even under the heaviest of loads. Need to load 10,000 tabs? That'll suck but your UI events will be intertwined with the events of each tab being added so everything would still actually work.
But clearly no one does this, so as someone who's never written a browser, what an I missing?
So each tab has a thread? They still can't manage to multithread a bunch of different shit in one tab? My problem with Firefox's single-threading is never that I'm trying to do CPU intensive shit in two tabs at once, it's that some shitty Flash or video is hogging 100% of one CPU core and stuttering when it would work fine if they could just manage to use more than one core to playback the damn content.
Tabs and plugins run in the same process: plugin-container.exe
All those processes share some state, so if one crashes all bets are off regarding the other processes too. Expect pwnage soon
How about, erm... implementing the current JavaScript standard first? Which is one year old already? Sure 80-something percent is done, but e.g. where is the module support?
Whereas improved performance in apps is a good thing, the elephant in the room is the lack of privacy.
Google is state sponsored spyware on a global scale. Microsoft Windows and Facebook are as well.
see:
http://betanews.com/2015/08/15/firefox-stealthily-loads-webpages-when-you-hover-over-links-heres-how-to-stop-$
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-stop-firefox-making-automatic-connections
There is no lack of performance in a web browser on modern machines. The slowdown is because websites
all spider-connect to so many script hosts that are for the most part ALL tracking you. CDN's are the
exception. You should use adblock and noscript. With noscript you have to go to Options/Advanced/XSS
and remove the "help yourself Google" permissions. Just clear the big box. yahoo and wikipedia go
with it. You can allow them when you are actually on their pages.
Between that and all the Google captcha and Cloudflare captchas, the US Gov is fucking up the
Internet. Like actual Internet spy-ders. Every time you want to go to a site and you aren't already
"equipped" with Windows 10 global spyware or a Windows phone, you get blocked with match-the-lakes
and match-street-addresses and match-street-signs. Those are in general saying Google, let me pass to
the site I want.
If you don't already know, install NoScript browser add-on and configure it to see exactly how many
sites even slashdot connects to. Check other sites. They all check-in with Google which is presently
still in fear of the US Gov.
Linux versions of Firefox are also affected by these "feature implementations". On Windows however
you should use Portable versions if you even use Windows at all.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/portableapps/files/Mozilla%20Firefox%2C%20Portable%20Ed./
They just extract to any folder you want and just open the executable. There is no install. Then you can
configure them to shut out the tracking and prefetching. The absolute only hassle in Windows with
portable apps is if you want to associate filetypes. You don't need to, but you can. It's easy too.
... as Firefox on Windows and Linux,
Not really a problem these days because your typical system has 8GB to 16GB of RAM, or more.
What is Firefox's target market? Old slow computers with no RAM, or modern systems?
If Firefox fixed the performance, syncing (bookmarks, settings, passwords and plug-ins etc), was available on Android and iOS, - to be inline with Chrome I'd consider using it again.
Ok then. Not a leak.
How about a large memory footprint that won't go away no matter whether you closed most of the tabs or not, or whether you did memory minimization or not.
One that you have to fix by closing and reopening the browser... and if left alone causes the browser to become really slow and eventually crash.
What do you call one of those?
Rust is a memory-safe language, meaning it is less vulnerable than C to certain types of bugs. That's great.
PHP is also memory-safe, as are most languages. Does that mean that writing software in PHP makes it secure? Quite obviously not, especially older versions of PHP. I certainly hope the current Mozilla developers don't have any false sense of security from using Rust.
Rust has a few tools which help mitigate specific types of vulnerabilities, often turning information leak bugs into denial of service instead. That's nice, but one should be careful not to overestimate the security benefit. If the programmers continue to try to write code that works, it'll still be full of security holes until they start thinking about what happens when things don't work - when a port number is higher than 65536, when http headers contain illegal bytes, etc.
This is the first major number increase, right?
Get 47!
Today
Get 48!
The only extensions I'm using are NoScript and Adblock.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
The only extensions I'm using are NoScript and Adblock, that's it. Period.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Maybe it was such a moving target because Mozilla kept changing stuff for no good reason?
This would make a big performance improvement on Windows. It should make no difference on Linux or OSX.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
It doesn't take much more RAM to break things into multiple processes. It just looks that way because of copy-on-write pages. Look at active pages in vmstat. I told them to use one process per origin domain, and have each origin have its own storage, and even created a proof of concept on top of webkit in 400 lines of code. Not a single comment against. Just silence. Firefox is dead.
Ultra extreme loony browser guy here again...
Switched to nightlies about 3 months ago to try and get more performance, you'd be extremely surprised just how stable the experience has been.
Current tabs open : 399
It still has issues switching from tab to tab to tab and once you have a certain amount open, opening more isn't ideal either, delays can exceed a second or two, super bad times, up to 10 seconds...
I guess about once a week I do see a crashed tab not take out the browser, so that's good but I'm still not happy with the perf to be honest. (for some reason, the 48 nightlies felt faster than 49, not sure why)
Sometimes in really bad moments it can take over a second to switch tabs, scrolling is slow, clicking in boxes is slow, the whole thing lags up. If you're going to go multi-core at least give me 1 full core for my current tab, entirely independent of the others, furthermore, the 2 tabs directly to my left and right of my position should be prioritised too.
(16gb, quad core machine here)
What are you smoking? You can always deny the update.
This isn't Windows 10.
Web browsers are extremely resource intensive, even when advertiser networks are blocked. Lighter CPU and RAM load is needed, after or before more esoteric script blocking.
ever since mozilla abandoned it's goal of technological progress in favor of the promotion of social justice
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
There's a significant number of users that switched from IE and Firefox to get away from toolbars and other spam extensions.
Of course they started getting them in Chrome too after a while but that wasn't enough to make them go back.
You need to uncheck the following "security" options:
[ ] Block reported attack sites
[ ] Block reported web forgeries
[ ] Whatever telemetry data
Stop the browser then delete the giant sqlite files on disk and set your disk cache to a moderate (not too low, not too high) level. Restart.
Also use the right amount of privacy-minded extensions to limit remote scripts and resources.
I call that your shitty operating system.
Great, so now I'll need to make sure I have less tabs open than CPU cores or my browser can lock up my entire machine running 18 layers of scripts to fetch me a personalised ad. When will browser developers realise that the internet is just the internet, not the sole purpose of computing?
It's OK Bender, there's no such thing as 2.
Web browsers are extremely resource intensive, even when advertiser networks are blocked. Lighter CPU and RAM load is needed, after or before more esoteric script blocking.
No, they are not. 30+ years of staring at top, ps aux. and dozens of CPU sensor applications say otherwise. libsensors do you speak it?
Not even if you use Shockwave in 2 browsers in 1 virtual machine, Flash in 2 browsers in another virtual machine, and Silverlight in another virtual machine will your CPU even begin to be "extremely resource intensive" as you [mistakenly] put it.
Any modern computer (desktop/laptop/etc) has no problems with web surfing. It is very light CPU and ram intensive relative to how many tabs you open.
Blocking advertiser networks and tracker scripts like Google's exhaustive spy network have minuscule effect on your CPU. Your computer is just waiting for their remote servers to concurrently shake hands with you AND the other 10's of millions of tracked citizens.
This is exactly why they're finally getting off their duffs and improving the addon ecosystem. But it turns out that their userbase doesn't want them to. WebExtensions are seen as "cloning Chrome", and even simple signing of addons is seen as a useless gesture akin to Big Brother breathing down their necks.
Firefox users really did it to themselves with respect to addons. Mozilla's fault was spoiling them by opening Pandora's Box.
The problem is though that without efforts like e10s Firefox is going to die anyway. The browsing experience in Firefox is usually quite nice... until some script or something on some tab suddenly locks up the browser and the only thing you can do is wait. As the web gets more and more JavaScript-heavy, and the scripts in question seemingly written by less-and-less competent developers, this is eventually going to become such a big problem that people will abandon ship if it isn't fixed. (I must admit that I've been pretty close to switching to Chrome myself.)
This is actually the reason I no longer use Firefox, actually.
The reasoning is that to be a SJW, your brain has to have stopped thinking rationally (and actually reject logic), which in turn means that when you analyze problems, you derive the wrong causes and conclusions, which leads to taking all the wrong decisions and having the priorities backwards, which leads to really poor planning, poor hiring, poor developing, and disastrous results for your product.
It does not help either that SJWs actively disregard talent and skill as tools of the patriarchy. Sorry if I prefer to use a browser written by more competent people, and with that, I mean "not actively pursuing incompetence at all costs"
You are doing something wrong. The whole point of going multithreaded or even multi process is to do things in parallel. If you then add interlocking you are causing all threads / processes to run one after the other instead of parallel. So you get the overhead of many threads / processes, the overhead of locking and the slow speed of serial evaluation.
Rewrite your app so each instance on a tab runs on its own with some minor exceptions for changing the config or so. Having to lock should be the rare exception or your users won't be happy.
Unless, you know, we stop counting consoles or phones (which android has chrome by default and for its voice search) then they have over 15%
I can use the new version of Firefox to remove unwanted body hair? cool!
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
More Chrome parity. That is Mozilla's concept to win users back. Let's be like Chrome and we win the browser war. Idiocy. Users use Firefox because it is not Chrome like, because it had no Chrome like extensions and uses no Google technology in their extensions, because it had features in the core which almost no other browser had. But today, it is all about being like Chrome.
Until i find a solution for sync with my own server. Firefox removed the sync 1.1 protocol with local-only key (additional to the password) and now allows you to login only with e-mail and password. This means, the firefox server can decipher your data.
They have some wrapping scheme, but it's just not working when they deliver a modified login page grabbing the plaintext password.
No go.
They just should have stopped changing the API all the time. Too easy? Maybe ... not changing APIs seems to be boring to mozilla devs.
Thanks.