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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
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @01:12PM
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
I am a crackpot
(Score: 2) by emg on Friday November 14 2014, @06:11PM
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
All your computing resources should be put into running Firefox. And with this update, they will.