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.

Comments

Yes, but........

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Yeah, that's all well and good, but have they fixed that fucking memory leak yet?

This is like boasting that you replaced one of the headlights on the rusted out Ford Falcon in your yard that's up on cinder blocks and has no motor.

Re: Honestly?

[Anonymous Coward]

In the meantime why not use the absence of evidence to the contrary as a proxy metric?

Perhaps because social characteristics of the Rust community suggest they are not to be trusted?