Slashdot Mirror
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.
They need to actually fix their process-per-tab first. I keep trying it only to be let down by bugs that make it unusable for me. For example, a userscript I use grabs alt+letter key hotkeys. In non-e10s, it works fine. In e10s, it activates the userscript action as well as the menu bar.
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).
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.
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.
Something like this maybe?
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
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.
You can call Chrome a resource hog all you want
My laptop has 16GB. I am using Chrome and have 18 tabs open. It is using less than 2GB in total. Why should I care if it is a hog as long as plentiful resources are available? The point of having resources is to use them. I am happy to trade memory for responsiveness and reliability.
Actually, they have. But ensure the extensions you are running are not leaking memory themselves.
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.
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.
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.
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/
These processes ARE using multi-threading. Multi-process has not replaced multi-threading.
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.
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
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.
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.
For anyone in tech (millenial or otherwise) a browser is pretty essential. I have at least 50 tabs open right now from a fresh browser this am. Only about 5 are for something other than work and 3 of them are open to different articles in my home wiki.
Even if it's just keeping that thing I already searched out earlier open for reference in case I need to go back to it. Many of them will stay open right up till a forced corporate reboot. Human memory is far more valuable than computer memory. Why try to learn or memorize formats, syntax, command options, file locations, etc when the web stores all that information?
Almost all the apps I work with are web based now. Aside from video/graphics heavy tasks, why do any kind of heavy lifting on your client? Slap a web interface on a server that will do the lifting and access it via a browser.
Why does a damn 'web browser' require 2GB of memory?
If your browser uses a separate process for each tab, then you'll have 18 instances of process overhead when 18 tabs are open.
In Chrome, the rendering engine, plugins, and extensions each run in their own process as well. Some plugins are quite demanding.
In addition, there must be a fairly comprehensive framework for interprocess communication so plugins can function.
You trade significant RAM overhead and low/moderate CPU overhead for some security and reliability. The ability to have individual tabs/plugins hang or crash without affecting the others is probably the most practical benefit, as there always seems to be some web site with absolutely retarded scripting that ends up eating an entire CPU core.
---
According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
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...
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!
Because some people might have far more than 18 tabs open, and they might be doing other things with the rest of their RAM. That kind of memory usage isn't going to cut it when 18 tabs becomes 100.
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)
With 2GB.. you could ship an entire operating system 100 times over that could run applications, far richer and far more responsive, than any web page. I don't see why its acceptable for a web browser to take up that much memory.
Perhaps I'm not a real-world user (at least not in this decade), but the machine I'm using has 1GB of RAM. (I got the upgrade option instead of going with the default 512MB when I got it, maybe about 8 years ago.) Besides me though, I think memory usage may also be relevant for kids with a low-end smart phone or Raspberry Pi, and/or people living in the third world. I think at least one of those probably does count as legitimate a real-world use.
ever since mozilla abandoned it's goal of technological progress in favor of the promotion of social justice
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Also an OSX user, and Firefox, with the right privacy-minded plugs, works wonders with a long-running low footprint. I use tree tabs so I have at least 30+ tabs open regularly. Neither Chrome nor FF will protect you from shitty javascript - you must prohibit that yourself.
What a PITA it was just to stop Chrome from running on startup!
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.
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.
This isn't the 90s, people don't buy a new PC every couple years.
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.