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Google Chrome 57 restricts out-of-focus background tabs to 1% of a single core's CPU load, with exceptions for tabs that are playing music or maintaining a real-time connection to a server using WebRTC or WebSockets:
In September last year, the Chromium team said changes were coming to Chrome's handling of background tabs, but the changes have landed in the stable branch of Chrome a little sooner than expected. Basically, from now on, background tabs will be limited to an average CPU load of just 1 percent on a single core.
Chrome 57's actual mechanism for background tab throttling is a little more complex. After 10 seconds of being in the background (i.e. not in focus), each tab has a budget (in seconds) for how much CPU wall time it can use. (Wall time is the actual real-world time it takes for a process to start and complete.) The background tab is only allowed to use the CPU if it hasn't consumed its entire budget. Here's the kicker: the budget constantly regenerates, but only at a rate of 0.01 seconds per second.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by julian on Sunday March 19 2017, @06:33PM (3 children)
I'll probably butcher this explanation but I think I understand the gist of it. The reason this happens in Firefox is there's a single process that handles every tab and the GUI, so if one tab is doing a lot of work in the background it makes the entire browser unresponsive until its done. Chrome spreads the work over multiple processes and cores so that the entire experience feels more responsive under load (at the cost of using more of your computer's resources).
The other issues you mentioned are the result of Mozilla squandering money and dev time on side projects which might be interesting but don't improve their core product, the Firefox browser. They are not like Google. Google has so much money and so many developers they can afford to let many of them work on projects that probably will never pan out on the off chance they'll get something hugely successful like Gmail.
Mozilla has to be a leaner, more focused, company/foundation. They can, at most, do maybe 2 things well at a time. I wish they'd stick to Firefox, especially catching up on speed and security, and then if there's any time or resources left over do more advocacy for net neutrality, and keeping the Internet free and open. How many man-years were wasted on their phone OS that no one will ever use?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20 2017, @07:29AM (2 children)
Mozilla could probably save a good bit of money by not renting prime office space in major cities. I noticed their Taibei office right across from Taipei 101, other tenants are big finance outfits.
(Score: 1) by toddestan on Wednesday March 22 2017, @12:34AM (1 child)
The Mozilla Foundation brings in something like $330 million a year. Sure, there's some overhead and they have some other projects, but with a third of a billion dollars I would think they could completely rewrite Firefox from scratch every year.
Then again, maybe browsers are really hard. Microsoft is a lot bigger than Mozilla and the best they can seem to come up with is Edge.
(Score: 2) by julian on Wednesday March 22 2017, @04:47AM
Then again, maybe browsers are really hard.
They really are. They really are because of what we demand browsers be capable of in 2017. It's comparable to building an entire operating system. You're right though about the scale of the problem. $1B*0.33 ought to be enough to develop a browser. But Mozilla isn't just a browser company.
They should be, IMO. Hence the tension. Mozilla should be the foundation making the Firefox browser. If there's anything left over, consider something else.