Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by LaminatorX on Friday November 14 2014, @11:59AM   Printer-friendly
from the separation-of-concerns dept.

Martin Brinkmann at gHacks reports

Electrolysis [(a.k.a. e10s a.k.a. multi-process Firefox)] has been in development for a long time but has been prioritized only recently by Mozilla (again) after not being in focus for some time.

[...]The core idea behind the new architecture is to separate web content from the core Firefox process. The two main advantages of doing so are security and performance.

Security benefits from potential sandboxing of web contents and separation of processes, and performance mainly from the browser UI not being affected by web contents.

[...]The Are We e10s yet website lists popular browser add-ons and whether or not they are compatible with e10s yet. If you browse the list of add-ons on that page you will notice that many add-ons are not yet compatible.

Mozilla made the decision to enable e10s for Firefox Nightly versions by default with [the November 7] update. This does not mean that the last phase of development has begun and that stable users will get the feature in three release cycles, however.

[...]users can disable e10s

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @01:05PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @01:05PM (#115878)

    LOL! WTG Firefox devs! I remember hearing about this back in 2009. It only took you guys and gals 5 years to do what Chrome has had forever! LOL!

    • (Score: 0) by Inops on Friday November 14 2014, @01:13PM

      by Inops (4366) on Friday November 14 2014, @01:13PM (#115883)

      Give them some slack, anon.

      I've spent that time trying to get rid of Firefox users.

    • (Score: 1) by Gertlex on Friday November 14 2014, @02:09PM

      by Gertlex (3966) Subscriber Badge on Friday November 14 2014, @02:09PM (#115898)

      Funnier part is that (apparently) IE 8 had this feature prior to Chrome, as well.

      (I was just looking into what the status of multi-process FF was a few days ago. I am potentially bummed that the guy doing Pale Moon doesn't want to add this capability.)

      • (Score: 2) by everdred on Friday November 14 2014, @06:54PM

        by everdred (110) Subscriber Badge on Friday November 14 2014, @06:54PM (#116010) Homepage Journal

        > I am potentially bummed that the guy doing Pale Moon doesn't want to add this capability.

        That's disappointing to hear.

  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @01:12PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @01:12PM (#115881)

    This is great and all, but when will the excessive memory usage problems be fixed? When will the slow performance problems be fixed?

    Doesn't Electrolysis just mean that instead of one process with these problems, I'll now have one process per tab with these problems?

    How will my poor laptop cope? It already had 12 GB of RAM and a modern quad-core CPU, and normal browsing with Firefox can bring it to its knees.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @04:05PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @04:05PM (#115929)

      This is now akin to the old trope of "Linux has bad hardware support" or "who will build the roads"? It's a tired cliche that has no relevance to the current state of affairs. I'm running 12 fairly heavy tabs right now and Firefox is using 174M of memory. Chrome would be running 12 processes that would sum higher than that I'm sure.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @04:36PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @04:36PM (#115945)

        12 tabs, and only 174 MB of memory used? Come on. If you're going to lie to is, at least make it sound plausible.

        I just did a clean installation of Firefox 33.1 on a fresh Ubuntu 14.10 VM. After starting it up, and after it has loaded its default page, it's using 527 MB of real memory. 499 MB is private.

        So without any extensions and without any browsing, we are looking at a baseline of about 500 MB.

        Do you see now why your numbers are junk?

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @05:47PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @05:47PM (#115969)

          You are doing it wrong.
          I have a bunch of firefox profiles installed on Mint 16 they all have about 20 add-ons (noscript, adblock, requestpolicy, ghostery, https-everywhere, stylish, etc)
          Currently running firefox 33.0, 64-bit.

          With three separate instances (two different profiles) running for at least 2 days and each with at least 5 tabs in use (and 20+ tabs saved from the previous session but not yet reloaded) two are right around 390M resident, another is about 345M resident.

          Also running a recent tor browser bundle and that's only 276M resident after 5+ days.

        • (Score: 2) by Marand on Saturday November 15 2014, @04:21AM

          by Marand (1081) on Saturday November 15 2014, @04:21AM (#116124) Journal

          I just did a clean installation of Firefox 33.1 on a fresh Ubuntu 14.10 VM. After starting it up, and after it has loaded its default page, it's using 527 MB of real memory. 499 MB is private.

          I'm looking at 326 tabs, 525mb used. Debian, 32bit+PAE, iceweasel 31.1. RAM use without tabs was something like 250mb last I checked. Most of the memory use ends up being from javascript, so NoScript helps a lot.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @04:11PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @04:11PM (#115934)

      This is great and all, but when will the excessive memory usage problems be fixed?

      When you install extensions which prevent the automatic download of megabytes of crap (ads, unnecessary scripts, etc.) with every page visit. All that crap sits in the browser's memory space and adds to the footprint.

      • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @04:21PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @04:21PM (#115937)

        First we were told these memory and performance problems didn't exist.

        Then Chrome came on the scene and made it very clear that Firefox was extraordinarily inefficient.

        Unable to deny that the problems did in fact exist, you guys then blamed the problems on unspecified extensions that the users had allegedly installed.

        Then it turned out that these problems happen with a fresh installation of Firefox, with no extensions installed.

        Unable to blame extensions being present for the problems, now you guys blame extensions that aren't present!

        Come on! Make up your minds! Cut out the excuses!

        I know that missing adblock extensions aren't the problem, because my filtering proxy gets rid of that junk before it ever gets to Firefox.

    • (Score: 2) by tibman on Friday November 14 2014, @05:47PM

      by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Friday November 14 2014, @05:47PM (#115968)

      Something else is wrong with your computer. If FF brings your machine to its knees then you won't be able to play games, watch movies, or do anything computationally intensive. What exactly is happening? With 12GB you shouldn't be going to swap which means it is using all of your CPU? Except FF literally cannot do this (prior to multi-process). If FF is maxing one of your four cores and your machine is that slow then you have a completely different and unrelated problem.

      --
      SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @06:20PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @06:20PM (#115996)

        Oh, looky here. It's the old "it's a problem with your computer" excuse that you Firefox guys like to use, totally ignoring that the sane computer runs Chrome and other non-Mozilla browsers just fine, along with every other app the user uses. But the problem MUST be with the computer. It CAN'T be with Firefox, even though Firefox is the only software running on the computer that's broken. Riiiiiight.

        • (Score: 2) by tibman on Friday November 14 2014, @06:54PM

          by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Friday November 14 2014, @06:54PM (#116009)

          Install firefox and actually try it. Its nearly identical to Chrome. I use three browsers daily (Chrome, FF, and IE) for work. Chome is the fastest. FF is decent. IE blows but is used for compatibility. I literally have all three browsers open right now. Six tabs in FF (gmail, pandora, 4x SN). Chrome has a jasmine test runner open and some knockout api docs. IE has my company site open. Other applications i have open (on windows 7): Visual Studio 2013, Notepad++, SMSS, RDP, GitHub, PHPStorm7. This is a pretty shitty laptop imo. Specs below:

          CPU: Intel Core i5 2520M @2.5 GHz (2 physical cores)
          RAM: 8 GB DDR3
          MB: Dell
          Graphics: Intel HD
          Storage: 700GB SATA spinning drive.

          If my terrible laptop can do all this then yours with 50% more RAM and double the CPU cores can do far better. Something is wrong with your OS. Its very possible that FF does make your computer crawl. Its worth figuring out why. Could be infected with something?

          --
          SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
    • (Score: 2, Insightful) by curunir_wolf on Friday November 14 2014, @06:01PM

      by curunir_wolf (4772) on Friday November 14 2014, @06:01PM (#115974)
      Well at least they've started working on some actually useful features now, instead of trying to make Firefox and IDE, or some of the other useless stuff they've been doing. So - give them some kudos for that.
      --
      I am a crackpot
      • (Score: 2) by emg on Friday November 14 2014, @06:11PM

        by emg (3464) on Friday November 14 2014, @06:11PM (#115986)

        I'd be more impressed if they fixed some bugs, like menus randomly stopping working in some windows. Or the 'reload' button doing nothing on one tab when it works fine on all the others. Or Firefox perpetually starting up showing a page I visited weeks ago in one tab instead of the page which was open in that tab when I shut it down. Or...

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @07:30PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @07:30PM (#116020)

      All your computing resources should be put into running Firefox. And with this update, they will.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @01:15PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @01:15PM (#115884)

    I got tired of constantly dealing with broken addons when they switched to the rapid release schedule around Firefox 4. I don't want to go through that yet again thanks to Electrolysis. No thanks!

    • (Score: 1) by Wierd0n3 on Friday November 14 2014, @06:04PM

      by Wierd0n3 (1033) on Friday November 14 2014, @06:04PM (#115978)

      I like the Live Bookmarks in firefox.

      I like having my rss feeds for comics and news sit right on my bookmark bar. chrome a long time ago said they wouldn't support that feature, and i feel deprived not having it there

      (netflix is nicer in chrome though)

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @06:29PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @06:29PM (#116002)

      Firefox switched away from version checking addons somewhere around FF8 or FF9. I swear, Google fanboys are more obnoxious than Apple fanboys and Linux fanboys combined.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 15 2014, @02:44PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 15 2014, @02:44PM (#116195)

        Your comment is a perfect example of how you Mozilla and Firefox proponents shit all over your own users.

        From my reading of that comment, the GP is probably a Firefox user. You know, one of the few remaining Firefox users around.

        The comment says the GP doesn't "want to go through that yet again thanks to Electrolysis". So obvious the GP is acknowledging that the earlier problems no longer exist! And the GP is also acknowledging that he or she doesn't want to experience broken plugins again once Electrolysis is widespread, which indicates that the GP is still a Firefox user!

        So how do you treat Firefox users? You mislabel them as "Google fanboys" and then totally ignore what they actually wrote. Pathetic. It's no wonder people are fleeing Firefox. The browser isn't very good at all, and the Firefox community treats its users like total crap.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by MrNemesis on Friday November 14 2014, @01:44PM

    by MrNemesis (1582) on Friday November 14 2014, @01:44PM (#115891)

    As far as I can tell this is just separating out the UI process from the web rendering process (something that I had already hoped was done with multithreading but isn't); the best this will achieve is that, when rendering a web page uses up a whole CPU, you'll still be able to do stuff without the UI blocking like it does currently. So we're still limited to single-threaded performance when rendering sites which to me is the big performance problem with gecko*

    Still, glad to see some progress has been made - given how quiet things went with electrolysis I thought they'd completely given up on the project. Kudos to the devs dedicated to the plumbing on this one. Hopefully we'll see a move toward better threading across the renderer at some point...

    * I used to be one of those users that was constantly having issues with firefox and memory, probably because it's not unusual for me to have 50+ tabs open at a time (what can I say? I have good spatial awareness and have never had any problems locating a tab I was using previously). Back in the day it'd get to 1GB commit and slow down to a crawl, at 1.5 to 1.8GB it'd start crashing without fail (on windows anyway**). Certain pages would send it off leaking memory like a sieve. But I have to say with their push to minimise memory usage and fragmentation both in the browser engine and the add-ons they actually achieved some good results and for me at least FF now uses less memory (and handles it better) than the same workflow in IE or my beloved opera 12.

    ** I switched to pale moon a few lunar cycles ago because of the god-awful australis interface (and, due to using other add-ons like tabmix plus, additional add-ons like classic theme restorer break the UI in other subtle ways), I'm still stuck with the 32bit version at work due to application compatibility but it seems even better than FF at managing its heap once it gets into the higher commits. FF would exhibit slowdowns at >2GB but I've pushed palemoon over 3GB without any problems... other than the aforemenioned single threading. The 64bit version I use at home goes even further but I rarely push my home machines as hard as my work one where browsing's concerned.

    --
    "To paraphrase Nietzsche, I have looked into the abyss and been sick in it."
    • (Score: 2) by mechanicjay on Friday November 14 2014, @02:28PM

      Regarding memory usage and fragmentation -- I've seen things get much more stable with regards to Firefox and memory usage in the last year or so. I used to get tabs that leaked memory like crazy, to the point where if I left my browser open on my work machine over the weekend, I'd end up with a FF process using 4+GB of memory and be completely unresponsive. I haven't seen that behaviour in quite a while. Mostly my memory footprint stays around 1GB -- which is fine, I have a ton of tabs open on some heavyweight sites. Memory footprint itself doesn't bother me, as long as it's stable and not impacting the rest of the system.

      Regarding performance -- well, on anything older than a core2 Duo, I'm end up using Chrome, which is *noticeably* quicker to render pages on old hardware and keeps things usable. The only downside there, is that you're running Chrome.

      --
      My VMS box beat up your Windows box.
  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @02:06PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @02:06PM (#115896)

    Never heard of e10, not sure I want to.
    Sounds complicated.
    Complicated stuff is...well...crap.
    kindof like systemd

    • (Score: 0, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @10:15PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @10:15PM (#116055)

      Never heard of e10, not sure I want to.

      Well, SeƱor, let me educate you on the beauty of e10! You see, e10 is just a pared down incarnation of IE10! That's right, it's all of the E's goodness without that bothersome I hanging around to get in your way. Our market research shows that most people can't keep track of two vowels at the same time. So we jettisoned the I and kept the E! Why keep the E and not the I? Because there's not I in Chrome, silly ;-)

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Ian Johnson on Friday November 14 2014, @02:41PM

    by Ian Johnson (4866) on Friday November 14 2014, @02:41PM (#115915)

    It's funny to come here and see seven comments from people about how much they dislike Firefox. Mozilla have only themselves to blame for this. They've been waging a war against their users for the last two years:

    -They've made the user interface far less customisable (no option for tabs at bottom, limited toolbar customisation options, etc).
    -They've removed a great many features (status bar, addon bar, useful download manager, etc).
    -They've removed useful options (browser.download.manager.quitBehavior, browser.tabs.closeButtons).
    -They keep breaking extensions, which is more particularly annoying because you need more and more extensions just to keep the browser usable.
    -They've done nothing to address the real issues with Firefox, which are speed, stability and memory use (though they might have finally done something here).
    -They pissed off a lot of people with the hiring, and subsequent firing, of Brendan Eich and pissed off the Microsoft fanatics by cancelling the Metro version of Firefox.

    At this point their brand is toxic and when you see Firefox OS, or other Mozilla product, you run a mile. From being stable at 25% market share a couple of years ago, they've now dropped to 13.91% and are continuing to lose users rapidly. You would think this would spur them into action and force them to take a more user friendly approach to development, but instead they continue on with their "we know best" approach.

    How did they go from being champions of freedom to complete assholes?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @02:54PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @02:54PM (#115918)

      You're absolutely right.

      And what caused this? Hipsters and hipsterism.

      Their I-know-better-than-you attitude is toxic. Their appearance-over-utility attitude is toxic. Their social-"justice"-over-everything attitude is toxic. Thus everything these people get involved with becomes toxic, as well.

      It doesn't matter if it's Firefox, GNOME, Debian, Ubuntu, or even Windows 8. Anything and everything they touch gets ruined.

      • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @04:58PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @04:58PM (#115951)

        So much this. They lost their way when they started spending more time on how things feel rather than how they work. Firefox started as the lean, working implementation of the bloated Netscape browser and its successor. Social justice took precedence over code, because fighting for right is hipper than writing code right. Then they got so hipster that they thought they were an ad company, and now they're building in ads right in the browser, making the damned thing adware [adexchanger.com]. Now one's left to wonder which thread the ads will run in, the core or the content? When will the first exploit hit the new ads? Will Mozilla ever learn to split its value-driven marketing hipster thread from its engineer thread?

        • (Score: 2) by fnj on Friday November 14 2014, @06:44PM

          by fnj (1654) on Friday November 14 2014, @06:44PM (#116007)

          They lost their way when they started spending more time on how things feel rather than how they work.

          But but but it's all about how things FEEEEEEEEEEEL! Nothing else matters.

      • (Score: 1) by Refugee from beyond on Friday November 14 2014, @06:04PM

        by Refugee from beyond (2699) on Friday November 14 2014, @06:04PM (#115977)

        Do not redirect my anger, oh, Anonymous One.

        --
        Instantly better soylentnews: replace background on article and comment titles with #973131.
    • (Score: 2) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Friday November 14 2014, @05:27PM

      by PizzaRollPlinkett (4512) on Friday November 14 2014, @05:27PM (#115962)

      How? I think it's sort of a generational change in "open source" (what used to be free-as-in-freedom) software. Even the name "open source" is intentionally a smokescreen to confuse the issues of freedom versus corporate exploitation. We've gone from technical people who care about software quality to people who co-opt these projects (Firefox, Gnome, etc) and turn them into something else like corporate software. Firefox copies Chrome. Gnome ruins a decade of workflows by getting rid of fixed virtual desktops. It's like once the software gets to the point it works, projects get taken over by people who just want to churn them and change them for no reason. I think a lot of this goes back to the change from "free software" to "open source", which opened up free software to be exploited by corporations. Why do any work when you can build a walled garden on top of other people's efforts? Once Apple and Google started using Linux for their walled gardens, "open source" has gone downhill very quickly. Or, maybe the old-timers just got out of the game and moved on to something else. Whatever it is, it's happened big time in the past few years.

      --
      (E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @06:58PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @06:58PM (#116012)

        "It's like once the software gets to the point it works, projects get taken over by people who just want to churn them and change them for no reason."

        They are just channeling their inner Steve Jobs.

        OS X on the desktop sucks ass now for exactly this reason.
        Churn for no useful USER purpose. Just the purposes of The Corporation.

    • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Monday November 17 2014, @02:34PM

      by urza9814 (3954) on Monday November 17 2014, @02:34PM (#116729) Journal

      -They've made the user interface far less customisable (no option for tabs at bottom, limited toolbar customisation options, etc).

      Am I the only person who prefers the new interface? Although I always liked Chrome's interface, and one of the major complaints I hear about Firefox's is that it's too much like Chrome. I don't need a hundred toolbars, my vertical space is limited enough as it is.

      -They've removed a great many features (status bar, addon bar, useful download manager, etc).

      Huh? The status bar is still there, it just doesn't appear when there's nothing to display. Download manager is still there too. Not sure about the "addon bar" as I have no idea what that is.

      -They keep breaking extensions, which is more particularly annoying because you need more and more extensions just to keep the browser usable.

      More extensions generally make browsers LESS usable as far as I can tell. But hey the few I use (NoScript, Ghostery, Firebug) have never broken since I installed them....

      -They've done nothing to address the real issues with Firefox, which are speed, stability and memory use (though they might have finally done something here).

      Chrome crashes *several times a day* for me; Firefox crashes maybe once a month. Haven't noticed any issues on speed or memory use, except for one particularly poorly behaved website that does cause Firefox to suck up a large amount of CPU where it does not on Chromium. Something about the Javascript performance I think, Chrome *has* always had a better JS engine...

      -They pissed off a lot of people with the hiring, and subsequent firing, of Brendan Eich and pissed off the Microsoft fanatics by cancelling the Metro version of Firefox.

      Isn't Microsoft basically dropping Metro now anyway? Might be good they didn't waste the effort!

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @04:24PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @04:24PM (#115938)

    I don't see why firefox doesn't simply detect your system resources and automatically configure itself accordingly. There should be a stable 64 bit version of firefox by now. The user should be able to select a 32 bit or a 64 bit stable version (in case the reason is that they want to still support legacy users). The maximum ram usage should be based on how much ram the computer has. The number of cores used should also be based on the number of cores the computer has. If it's an eight core processor then firefox should dedicate one core for the UI, one core for the active tab, and one core for inactive tabs and windows if there are inactive cores available. Software and operating systems should do everything they can to avoid leaving too many inactive cores lying around.

    • (Score: 2) by emg on Friday November 14 2014, @05:24PM

      by emg (3464) on Friday November 14 2014, @05:24PM (#115960)

      "There should be a stable 64 bit version of firefox by now."

      I've been using 64-bit Firefox since around 2008.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @06:09PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @06:09PM (#115983)

        He wote "stable 64 bit". See the "stable" part? That implies it performs predictably. Unpredictably consuming large amount of memory and unpredictable excessive CPU usage like Firefox does inherently means it is not stable.

    • (Score: 2) by fnj on Friday November 14 2014, @06:49PM

      by fnj (1654) on Friday November 14 2014, @06:49PM (#116008)

      And all the inactive tabs should be consuming ZERO GODDAM CPU! There is no excuse whatsoever for CPU usage to skyrocket as the number of tabs increases. Only one of those tabs has the focus. You can only see the display for one of those tabs. Once the other tabs have loaded they should be FROZEN until one of them gets the focus again.

      Sheesh, are these developers absolute clueless morons?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @11:17PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @11:17PM (#116067)

        I agree once the tab has loaded there should be no CPU usage but I am obviously referring to tabs that haven't completely loaded. If there is idle CPU usage to spare why not use it to load unused tabs so that when I switch to them they are already loaded instead of having to make me way for them to start loading.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @11:20PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @11:20PM (#116069)

          typos

          unloaded tabs *

          wait *

        • (Score: 3, Informative) by MrNemesis on Saturday November 15 2014, @11:47AM

          by MrNemesis (1582) on Saturday November 15 2014, @11:47AM (#116175)

          Tools > options > tabs > untick "don't load tabs until selected" and any tabs that previously loaded in the background will now start to load immediately. Bear in mind this option was added to prevent the CPU being hammered at startup and also to prevent pages that were never loaded taking up space in RAM.

          --
          "To paraphrase Nietzsche, I have looked into the abyss and been sick in it."
          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 15 2014, @05:16PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 15 2014, @05:16PM (#116217)

            I already have it set up to load inactive tabs (makes it a much better experience) but I don't believe it loads those tabs on a separate core, which was my point. If you have spare unused cores why not?