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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."
Sandboxing all of FF's plugins is good security practice.
If I understand correctly, Mozilla is re-writing their layout engine in Rust, which should be considerably more secure than Blink (Chrome's engine). But that's still in alpha stage.
"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.
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.
Web browsers have to be colossal in size and features because nowadays many people do all of their work, all of their shopping, and interact with all of their multimedia through it. For better or worse, Firefox/Chrome/Safari/IE/Edge are practically entire operating systems, lacking only a kernel.
If you'd like a browser that "does one thing and does it well", you might want to stick to Lynx. I think most people want more than that though. And if you want more than that, the modularity and security features of the aforementioned browsers are invaluable.
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/
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.
Chromium has 51353 open issues, Firefox has >10000, webkit has >10000. So according to your logic, Rust is the best!
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
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)