Firefox Finally Confirms 'Largest Change Ever' Featuring Electrolysis In v48 (zdnet.com) 187
Firefox is finally getting multi-process support. Mozilla has announced that Electrolysis (e10s) will be available to users starting Firefox 48. The foundation finds it the most significant Firefox change since the browser's inception. From a ZDNet report: With Electrolysis, Firefox can use child processes for content (tabs), media playback and legacy plug-ins. This is some way short of Google Chrome, which uses a different process for each tab. However, the result is that Chrome is a huge resource hog: Chrome uses roughly twice as much memory as Firefox on Windows and Linux. Eric Rahm has run some browser tests with Electrolysis, and says: "Overall we see a 10-20 percent increase in memory usage for the 1 content process case (which is what we plan on shipping initially). This seems like a fair trade-off for potential security and performance benefits." With 8 content processes, Rahm says: "we see roughly a doubling of memory usage on the TabsOpenSettled measurement. It's a bit worse on Windows, a bit better on OS X, but it's not 8 times worse."The aforementioned feature will be available in Firefox 48 Beta shortly.
Honestly? (Score:2, Insightful)
Performance is the least of their problems. Security, first.
Re: Honestly? (Score:5, Interesting)
Optimization isn't premature if it's totally awesome optimalization, am I right? I'm pretty sure some old Unix guy say "First, make it work, then make it work awesome, then make it work right."
Re: Honestly? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you'd like a browser that "does one thing and does it well", you might want to stick to Lynx. I think most people want more than that though. And if you want more than that, the modularity and security features of the aforementioned browsers are invaluable.
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You're right, the whole "stack up layers of abstractions in a browser as a platform for everything" idea is patently stupid and cannot possibly work.
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If you want a browser following the unix-philosophy, you want to go with http://www.uzbl.org/ [uzbl.org]
But then again, Linux (not GNU/Linux) and X also do not follow the Unix philosophy ...
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The concept of premature optimization only assumes that software will eventually achieve representative functionality. Which it does long before anyone decides that it is "done".
Deciding what level of functionality is representative enough to start optimizing is hard. That's why the rules of optimization [c2.com] are:
1. Don't.
2. Don't Yet (for experts only).
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Premature optimization presumes that software will be done. You can optimize when a function stops changing.
Premature optimization [xkcd.com]
Re:Honestly? (Score:5, Informative)
If I understand correctly, Mozilla is re-writing their layout engine in Rust, which should be considerably more secure than Blink (Chrome's engine). But that's still in alpha stage.
Re: Honestly? (Score:2, Insightful)
Has the security of Rust been independently audited or researched? I hear many claims about Rust, but I never see any real evidence. Just because those who created it say it's secure it doesn't mean that it actually is.
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I don't know whether it *has* been independently audited, but it could be if anyone wanted to bother. That's the first step. Then you need to give someone independent a reason to bother.
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I keep seeing comments like these, and they're clearly from people who have never tried Rust nor Servo.
Sorry, guys, but they aren't what they think you are! I encourage you to try them out for yourselves to see what I mean. Don't just rely on hype you read somewhere.
Rust's one implementation is riddled with bugs. See for youself! [github.com]
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You know who's the best at making software similar to Google software? Google is. And that isn't an accomplishment to be proud of.
Even my beloved Opera has caught the Google Ghey. I think my RJ-45 plug needs a condom.
Re:Honestly? (Score:4, Informative)
There are over 2,400 open bugs right now, and that doesn't include the many thousands that they've supposedly fixed in the past.
Chromium has 51353 open issues, Firefox has >10000, webkit has >10000. So according to your logic, Rust is the best!
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Firefox is losing users left and right.
I stopped using FireFox regularly when Mozilla's attempts to make it more user friendly also took away much of the configuration controls I used.
Making something dumber is not the right way to make something more user friendly. It's lazy and not actually more friendly - not even to "the average, browse-the-web-and-send-messages/pictures person".
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Haskell has it's poiints if you don't need to do i./o. Once in get into monads the whole thing becomes more trouble than it's worth. Even Erlang is better. (Actually, Erlang is rather good. My only real complaint is that I need local state, and to do that in Erlang you need to be continually fighting the system.)
There is a class of problems for which functional languages are optimal. But it doesn't hold most problems. If you allow local state then you can do parallelism by message passing, and expand
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I'm designing one, but not through message passing.
I'm trying to do a design which has state variables (clearly demarcated) and callable functions that execute on other nodes. This avoids the need for message-passing by allowing functions to execute remotely and asynchronously. It does, of course, mean that functions that access state variables are also marked as such and such functions have only read-only access to state.
So, limited shared state but not shared memory.
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Well, I can see how that might work, but I'd need to understand more about what you're intending. I don't intent the mutable state to be externally readable, only to affect the messages that it passes in response to incoming messages.
What I think might happen with your proposal is that external read access to the state might be difficult to synchronize leading to various race conditions. I'm sure this can be worked around, but it seems to me that it could add greatly to the complexity.
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Well, I can see how that might work, but I'd need to understand more about what you're intending. I don't intent the mutable state to be externally readable, only to affect the messages that it passes in response to incoming messages.
Ah, but I'm doing away with messages altogether[1] :-) What I propose is that the line of code[2]:
... argN)
foo = funcall (func_ptr, arg1,
might get executed on another computer, so the implementation has to compile a list of state-variables that "func_ptr" reads and pass that stack to func_ptr. As func_ptr will be native code, the implementation will have to ensure at compile-time that func_ptr has all the references to state-variables that it might need during runtime. This obviates the need for many
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Judging by your example the language would be useless for my purposes because of excessive inter-thread/process communication overhead.
OTOH, I think that you should probably look carefully at Erlang, as it seems to already handle the case you appear to be talking about quite well.
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Judging by your example the language would be useless for my purposes because of excessive inter-thread/process communication overhead.
OTOH, I think that you should probably look carefully at Erlang, as it seems to already handle the case you appear to be talking about quite well.
I've programmed in Erlang for a few years. Played with Haskell as well, adequate in Lisp too :-) But thanks anyway,
Cheers
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There is a class of problems for which functional languages are optimal. But it doesn't hold most problems. If you allow local state then you can do parallelism by message passing, and expand the range of problems tremendously without adding significant complexity. But no language appears to do this
Smalltalk might make you happy, check it out. It's not like C++.
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Rust can be seen as some kind of imperative Haskell:
* Like Haskell, Rust has very strong typing, and auto-deriving of types.
* Guards and case in Haskell becomes match in Rust, with all the pattern matching you can do in Haskell
* The Result and Option types in Rust are essentially the same as the Either and Maybe types in Haskell
and many other common things.
Plugins aren't really "sandboxed" (Score:2)
PHP 4 was memory safe too (Score:2)
Rust is a memory-safe language, meaning it is less vulnerable than C to certain types of bugs. That's great.
PHP is also memory-safe, as are most languages. Does that mean that writing software in PHP makes it secure? Quite obviously not, especially older versions of PHP. I certainly hope the current Mozilla developers don't have any false sense of security from using Rust.
Rust has a few tools which help mitigate specific types of vulnerabilities, often turning information leak bugs into denial of service i
Could spell the end of FF if there are problems. (Score:5, Insightful)
What worries me the most is how this feature could very well spell the end of Firefox if users run into problems with it.
The latest web browser market share stats [caniuse.com] show Firefox at only about 6% to 7% of the market. That puts Firefox, across all platforms both mobile and desktop, well below Chrome, and around where individual versions of other browsers like Safari for iOS and IE are at.
So Firefox has no leeway at this time. Mozilla really can't afford to lose any more Firefox users than they've already lost.
Electrolysis hasn't exactly been a smooth project. It goes back many years, and my understanding is that they actually halted/delayed the project at one point, before restarting it. Its release has been pushed back again and again and again.
There have been cases in the past where Firefox changes have not gone well, and this has resulted in even more users leaving than who would've likely left had there not been problems.
For example, around the Firefox 4 era, when they switched to their new versioning scheme and rapid releases, many extensions were broken with each new release. This caused untold problems for Firefox users. Many of them moved to Chrome or other browsers at this point. By the time the Firefox devs got their acts together, it was too late; these users would never again use Firefox.
We saw something similar happen with Australis. Despite widespread dislike from the Firefox community at the time, Australis was pushed on all Firefox users. This was a painful transition for many. In some sense it proved to many that Firefox as they knew it was long dead; Firefox was now just a bad imitation of Chrome. Many Firefox users, when faced with the choice of using a poor imitation of Chrome (i.e. Firefox) or Chrome itself, just chose the lesser of two evils and used Chrome directly. Even if its UI is shitty, at least it's faster than Firefox.
If Electrolysis ends up breaking extensions for a lot of Firefox users, or if it ends up slowing down Firefox even more for them, I think we may see yet another mass exodus away from Firefox to Chrome and other browsers. That could very well take Firefox from being irrelevant to being completely irrelevant. Nobody will care about Firefox when it has only 2% or even 3% of the browser market. Web developers won't test with it, and sites won't work with it. Search engine providers won't sign deals with Mozilla if Firefox has few users.
The only thing that might be more devastating would be the extension signing changes that the Firefox developers have talked about.
I really don't want Firefox to become irrelevant, but I'm getting an awful feeling in my gut that that's exactly what we'll see when the Electrolysis rollout ends up being a major disaster for a lot of Firefox users. This could very well be what finally pushes them over the edge and to other browsers, meaning that Firefox would become irrelevant.
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I wonder why Mozilla has search a hard time understanding that the main draw of their browser is its extensions. Making sure they remain stable should be the #1 priority...at least, it should be higher up than introducing 'features' no one cares about. If Chromium had decent noscript and pentadactyl equivalents, I'd switch and never look back.
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They just should have stopped changing the API all the time. Too easy? Maybe ... not changing APIs seems to be boring to mozilla devs.
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Exactly. Firefox's 'loss' of market share is due to the increased usage of Android. Going by the actual numbers, people aren't flocking away from Firefox. If you buy a phone and start using it twice as often as you use Firefox on your desktop, Firefox doesn't suddenly lose two-thirds of its users. Their percentage of all web hits drops by two-thirds, but their user count remains the same. Assuming you're the only Firefox user in existence.
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Performance is the least of their problems. Security, first.
No, security second. The first priority should have been to think of a good name. "Electrolysis" already has a different meaning, which will cause confusion and make it difficult for people to Google for information, since nearly all the hits will be for the original meaning. There are billions of potential names, so why did they have to pick one of the few already being used? Even "Browsy McBrowseFace" would have been better than this.
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I'm all for the security benefit of this.
I'm also all for Firefox not being a bloated steaming pile that crashes constantly. It is, by far, the worst performing browser I use on the daily and that's *including IE11 which should say a lot. I seem to have seen the performance go completely away when I switched to the 64bit port so maybe my experience is specific to Windows x64 but honestly that's not a good excuse since that's no longer a unicorn environment. Both Chrome and IE have plenty of their own probl
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Haven't had Firefox crash in years. Over 500 tabs open, dozens of extensions. Whatever your problem is, it's not Firefox. If you think Firefox is bloated you're not paying attention to your Chrome.
Bad Windows Scheduler is driving this (Score:2)
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These changes do actually improve security. Firstly, by separating things out into threads with extremely limited permissions it makes it harder to do anything malicious by compromising them. At the moment everything runs in the main process, with the same permissions.
Secondly, they are cleaning up the add-on API to make it more secure. That will break some add-ons, but at least bugs in them won't be easily exploitable.
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Performance is by FAR their biggest problem, you haven't even outlined what security issues you have. You've just thrown a dead cat on the table and walked away. Ugh
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Really? (Score:2, Interesting)
Gosh... I've got 16Gb of RAM on my PC 6 of which is never used.
Please use my memory and give me more thread... please.
Firefox is such a performance dog and they are trying to sell small footprint?
Sorry- I think Firefox is a hideous browser.
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not going to happen, because: Cell Phones, Chromebooks, Firefoxbooks only have 2GB-4GB of ram
Use the RAM I have (Score:1)
not going to happen, because: Cell Phones, Chromebooks, Firefoxbooks only have 2GB-4GB of ram
Not relevant on my PC or my Mac. I'm typing this on a PC with 24GB of RAM and my Mac at home has 16GB. As long as it doesn't consume memory needed by other applications I don't mind at all if it uses lots of RAM to improve performance. If the machine has less RAM then adjust accordingly.
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This is a silly justification. The first problem is you listed Chromebooks, and this is EXACTLY what Chrome does. The RAM usage is still low for a rational number of tabs, a few hundred meg, and nobody is going to have 100 tabs open on a phone.
I noticed on Android and 32bit (low RAM) Windows systems Chrome seems to kill old background tabs. [google.com] They will reload if selected, but they are little more than a bookmark.
In any case I rather use Chrome on these systems than Firefox on any system, as Firefox will bloat up to 1.5-1.9GB RAM usage, even when all tabs except about:blank are closed. Open one more page and everything will crash.
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E10s turns that into e.g. a 700 MB process and a 1 GB process. That works around the 32bit limit.
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It's more ridiculous than that.
I use Chrome because it actually uses *less* RAM than Firefox. This is hard to count, because a lot of the RSS is shared memory: the Chrome executable and all loaded libraries are read-only and mapped to the same physical RAM across processes; any writable library data is initially mapped the same way, but gets copied when written (it's read-only but exposed read-write to the program; on protection fault writing, the kernel copies the page to another area of physical RAM,
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Hmmm... Should I trust real data or your unsubstantiated, purely imaginary, beliefs? Sorry, but your "investigation" concludes the exact opposite of what every one else has confirmed repeatedly. I suspect that's because you're not telling the truth, and instead want to spread FUD. You're like an anti-vaccine nut.
It's pretty well-established that when it comes to memory use and performance, Firefox beats Chrome hands-down. Faster rendering, better JS performance, lower memory and CPU use, pick a metric.
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If you are a typical browser user and have dozens of tabs opened and closed on a daily basis while leaving your browser open after just a couple days the memory consumption will be ridiculous.
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I rely on the 'save tabs on exit' thing to be able to keep a lot open, but not actually loaded. For a laugh, I clicked on all my tabs and watched memory usage climb to 2.8GB and CPU sitting at about 20% used, constantly.
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The only effective way to count RAM usage in this context is to measure RAM, kill the process tree, and measure RAM again.
Or you could use the built in browser memory reporting tools that show exactly what part is taking up how much memory. But that would be too easy wouldn't it.
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The built-in browser tools know which virtual pages are mapped to the same physical pages, even though knowing that information would require getting kernel-level access to read the page table entries for the process? Does Chrome install a kernel module?
The amount of RAM used by a set of processes which takes the exact same actions (down to the areas of memory allocated and the exact memory addresses used for every byte of data) will be different between Linux and Windows.
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Isn't that entirely irrelevant and completely out of scope of the software's control?
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It's out of the software's control, and still is completely relevant. The strategy of relying on shared pages makes the difference between whether a multiple-process model is *necessarily* huge bloat or easily-optimized to not bloat. For the application developer, it means designing the application to make some runtime state more stable (i.e. it's different per-run, but less-likely to change during a run) or to group strongly-stable state together (e.g. mmap() anonymous memory for blocks of things which
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I've only got 4GB on my laptop and I'm happy with Chrome using tonnes of RAM. The thing is, with an SSD and a modern OS, using lots of RAM isn't an automatic fail these days. In fact, often it's a good idea.
This was an interesting comment on Asa's blog (Score:5, Interesting)
"I am using Firefox Dev Edition with Electrolysis enabled from many months and it looks almost stable now. I dont know if anyone noticed this but the CPU and memory usage reduced drastically with increasing number of tabs (I have about 40 open tabs) with e10 enabled. And with this, Firefox uses lot less resources than Chrome on my system with multiple tabs."
https://asadotzler.com/2016/06... [asadotzler.com]
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The motherfucker who said we didn't need a status bar, because status bars took up too much precious vertical space, has a fucking position:fixed CSS div on his fucking webpage.
Fuck you, Asa. You were the cancer that killed Firefox back in 4.0.
It breaks extensions (Score:3)
been dealing with this as a nightly user and have turned off E10s - Though NoScript mostly works now, I have other extensions that have stopped. Unfortunately, at least one of them does not look to be too actively supported anymore. It is also not certain that E10s provides much more than easier recovery, the performance figures I have heard are not that great though I personally did not notice any slow down (or speed up).
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As I said in the last thread on FireFox... extensions are the only things that keep me using it. If they break extensions, I'll have no reason left to avoid switching.
(Hint to Mozilla: don't break extensions!)
If I could only reliably stop Chrome extensions from auto-updating, I'd have made the switch already. Basically, a dumb forced feature on Google's part is what is helping to keep me using FireFox.
Electrolysis? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Electrolysis? (Score:4, Insightful)
This is a huge multi-year project that almost rewrites whole portions of the browser. It's not just an entry on a changelog. It's a major undertaking that people have been discussing using a codename for a very long time. You need codenames because saying "project to split tabs into separate processes" over and over gets old. The name Electrolysis makes sense because that's essentially what they are doing: splitting one monolithic thing into smaller parts.
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That's down to poor abstraction and design, which hopefully was fixed in that re-write, not how monumental the feature is. That cleaner design is a bigger change than the process handling itself. If they've reworked that much of the code-base then it justifies a version increment that possibly would come with a cool code name the process handling itself... yes just a changelog.
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Where did they get a name like "Electrolysis"?
It's what web pages crave?
Finally (Score:2, Funny)
The processes are cool again? (Score:1)
Was not it only, what, 20 years ago, when multi-threading was all the rage, and the OSes, that didn't offer it, were ridiculed?
Can't wait for aout to come back and take over ELF again...
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These processes ARE using multi-threading. Multi-process has not replaced multi-threading.
Whatever. (Score:5, Insightful)
You can write the rendering engine in BASIC for all I care, just quit fucking with the UI.
You have the wrong story! The question is security (Score:1)
The story is that Mozilla can change your settings without your knowledge or permission, per Asa's blog: https://asadotzler.com/2016/06/06/firefox-48-beta-release-and-e10s/
It starts out simple enough, with some A-B testing:
"This is a huge change for Firefox, the largest we’ve ever shipped. roll-out plan that ensures we’re going slowly, measuring as we go and that we can throttle up as well as down depending on what we see.
Here’s what that looks like. When we launch Firefox 48, approximate
add-on developer here (Score:5, Interesting)
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This isn't good.
(as I said above, not breaking extensions is the only reason I stay with FireFox) [slashdot.org]
Wait (Score:1)
So each tab has a thread? They still can't manage to multithread a bunch of different shit in one tab? My problem with Firefox's single-threading is never that I'm trying to do CPU intensive shit in two tabs at once, it's that some shitty Flash or video is hogging 100% of one CPU core and stuttering when it would work fine if they could just manage to use more than one core to playback the damn content.
Multiprocess hoohah (Score:1)
Your house is on fire, they bring you a sandwich. (Score:1)
Whereas improved performance in apps is a good thing, the elephant in the room is the lack of privacy.
Google is state sponsored spyware on a global scale. Microsoft Windows and Facebook are as well.
see:
http://betanews.com/2015/08/15/firefox-stealthily-loads-webpages-when-you-hover-over-links-heres-how-to-stop-$
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-stop-firefox-making-automatic-connections
There is no lack of performance in a web browser on modern machines. The slowdown is because websites
all spider-connec
Mozilla, learn about virtual memory management (Score:1)
It doesn't take much more RAM to break things into multiple processes. It just looks that way because of copy-on-write pages. Look at active pages in vmstat. I told them to use one process per origin domain [mozilla.org], and have each origin have its own storage, and even created a proof of concept on top of webkit in 400 lines of code. Not a single comment against. Just silence. Firefox is dead.
It doesn't help that much, a little bit. (Score:4, Interesting)
Ultra extreme loony browser guy here again...
Switched to nightlies about 3 months ago to try and get more performance, you'd be extremely surprised just how stable the experience has been.
Current tabs open : 399
It still has issues switching from tab to tab to tab and once you have a certain amount open, opening more isn't ideal either, delays can exceed a second or two, super bad times, up to 10 seconds...
I guess about once a week I do see a crashed tab not take out the browser, so that's good but I'm still not happy with the perf to be honest. (for some reason, the 48 nightlies felt faster than 49, not sure why)
Sometimes in really bad moments it can take over a second to switch tabs, scrolling is slow, clicking in boxes is slow, the whole thing lags up. If you're going to go multi-core at least give me 1 full core for my current tab, entirely independent of the others, furthermore, the 2 tabs directly to my left and right of my position should be prioritised too.
(16gb, quad core machine here)
Re:It doesn't help that much, a little bit. (Score:4, Interesting)
If you're going to go multi-core at least give me 1 full core for my current tab...
A lot of the pain you're feeling is probably due to on-thread content rendering. Since you're already living on the bleeding edge by running nightly, you might as well try turning on async pan/zoom, which renders content on a separate thread. This has some dramatic responsivity improvements. Go into "about:config" and set the pref "apz.drag.enabled" to "true."
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Oh, and I forgot to mention -- I run with hundreds of tabs open from time to time as well, and it's usually just one or two bad apples that grind things to a halt. Since you're on 47 or later, you can go to about:performance and see which pages are chewing up CPU time. Closing the top CPU-hogging tabs makes everything work *much* better.
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Thanks for that, I'll have a play around. I saw your other reply and wasn't sure if you knew your stuff but I think from this post it's evident.
I use power close a lot (try it out) - it's quite handy when you're 400 deep in tabs and not sure what dupes you have open.
You don't develop by any chance do you? I have a cracker suggestion someone said they liked for the awesome bar but sadly hasn't gone anywhere.
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You don't develop by any chance do you?
Not as much as I'd like to, but I have a certain amount of influence over feature implementation. If you want to describe the idea here, I'll pass it along.
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https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/4c1i5k/i_need_pull_to_location_to_replace_switch_to_tab/ [reddit.com]
Basically I open a new tab, it's DIRECTLY RIGHT of my current tab (how I prefer my workflow)
I start to type a URL, awesomebar confirms, I do infact already have what I'm after open, great. I down arrow but I want it to *move* from current location (god knows where, 400 tabs open) into the new slot I just opened.
I imagine, if I could code, it would be one of the easiest plugins to make ever. I nearly posted on
wait, what? (Score:2)
Staying with 45esr (Score:2)
Until i find a solution for sync with my own server. Firefox removed the sync 1.1 protocol with local-only key (additional to the password) and now allows you to login only with e-mail and password. This means, the firefox server can decipher your data.
They have some wrapping scheme, but it's just not working when they deliver a modified login page grabbing the plaintext password.
No go.
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You can call Chrome a resource hog all you want
My laptop has 16GB. I am using Chrome and have 18 tabs open. It is using less than 2GB in total. Why should I care if it is a hog as long as plentiful resources are available? The point of having resources is to use them. I am happy to trade memory for responsiveness and reliability.
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Why does a damn 'web browser' require 2GB of memory? For non-millenials (i.e. people who work outside of marketing and social bs) web browsing isn't remotely a major component of their productive work activity. Computers must do what the users require, and in my work that often requires all 32 GB of memory plus 500 GB + of pagefile storage. I am forced to use Opera 12 as it is the only graphic windows browser compact enough not to interrupt that.
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Even if it's just keeping that thing I already searched out earlier open for reference in case I need to go back to it. Many of them will stay open right up till a forced corporate reboot. Human memory is far more valuable than computer memory. Why try to lear
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Why does a damn 'web browser' require 2GB of memory?
If your browser uses a separate process for each tab, then you'll have 18 instances of process overhead when 18 tabs are open.
In Chrome, the rendering engine, plugins, and extensions each run in their own process as well. Some plugins are quite demanding.
In addition, there must be a fairly comprehensive framework for interprocess communication so plugins can function.
You trade significant RAM overhead and low/moderate CPU overhead for some security and reliability. The ability to have individual tabs/plugin
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Something like this [steamboattoday.com] maybe?
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Actually, they have. But ensure the extensions you are running are not leaking memory themselves.
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The only extensions I'm using are NoScript and Adblock, that's it. Period.
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Firefox has had memory leaks under control for a long time. Regressions ebb and flow with releases but almost surely what you are calling a Firefox memory leak is not an actual memory leak. I'd say more than half of users who talk about memory leaks don't know the difference between a memory leak and large memory footprint.
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The only extensions I'm using are NoScript and Adblock.
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This isn't the 90s, people don't buy a new PC every couple years.