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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.
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.
Optimization isn't premature if it's totally awesome optimalization, am I right? I'm pretty sure some old Unix guy say "First, make it work, then make it work awesome, then make it work right."
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
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 keep seeing comments like these, and they're clearly from people who have never tried Rust nor Servo.
Sorry, guys, but they aren't what they think you are! I encourage you to try them out for yourselves to see what I mean. Don't just rely on hype you read somewhere.
Rust's one implementation is riddled with bugs. See for youself! There are over 2,400 open bugs right now, and that doesn't include the many thousands that they've supposedly fixed in the past.
If Rust is supposedly "secure" and good for writing robust software, then why is the Rust implementation and standard library, which are written in Rust by the people who designed Rust, so buggy? Don't give me excuses about it being "complex" or "new", either.
How are average programmers supposed to benefit from Rust if those who know it the best are creating buggy code using it?
And then there's Servo. Where to begin, where to begin! It's nowhere near ready for any sort of usage. Try it for yourself. Please do it! See how awful it currently is. It's probably 15 years behind the other browsers. Will it manage to make up those 15 years any time soon? I really doubt it! Will it be able to then surpass the other browser engines, which obviously won't be standing still either? I really doubt it!
I'm truly scared for Mozilla's future. Firefox is losing users left and right. Rust and Servo aren't accomplishing much. And worse than that, we have people like you who seem to think that Rust and Servo are some glorious saviors, when realistically they're probably just wastes of time and effort.
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/
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)