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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.
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."
"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.
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)