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