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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: 4, Insightful) by Ian Johnson on Friday November 14 2014, @02:41PM
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
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
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
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
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
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
"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
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.
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.
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....
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...
Isn't Microsoft basically dropping Metro now anyway? Might be good they didn't waste the effort!