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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.
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.
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.
Exactly. Firefox's 'loss' of market share is due to the increased usage of Android. Going by the actual numbers, people aren't flocking away from Firefox. If you buy a phone and start using it twice as often as you use Firefox on your desktop, Firefox doesn't suddenly lose two-thirds of its users. Their percentage of all web hits drops by two-thirds, but their user count remains the same. Assuming you're the only Firefox user in existence.
Why does a damn 'web browser' require 2GB of memory? For non-millenials (i.e. people who work outside of marketing and social bs) web browsing isn't remotely a major component of their productive work activity. Computers must do what the users require, and in my work that often requires all 32 GB of memory plus 500 GB + of pagefile storage. I am forced to use Opera 12 as it is the only graphic windows browser compact enough not to interrupt that.
This is a huge multi-year project that almost rewrites whole portions of the browser. It's not just an entry on a changelog. It's a major undertaking that people have been discussing using a codename for a very long time. You need codenames because saying "project to split tabs into separate processes" over and over gets old. The name Electrolysis makes sense because that's essentially what they are doing: splitting one monolithic thing into smaller parts.