Firefox 54 goes multi-process, eight years after work began

https://arstechnica.co.uk/information-technology/2017/06/firefox-multiple-content-processes/

by agd • 9 years ago

126 45 9 years ago

arstechnica.co.uk

pvdebbe• 9 years ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14547559

Those wanting to quickly disable electrolysis for whatever reason- go to about:config and set browser.tabs.remote.autostart to false.

If you have an incompatible addon, you'll still not be on the multi-process train.

I don't know how to find which add-on is incompatible though (yet)

pricechild• 9 years ago

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-compat... will tell you.

Tepix• 9 years ago

But is that add-on multiprocessCompatible itself? :-)

srean5• 9 years ago

Well, 800 tabs open is business as usual for me, wonder what it will do in this case.

Edit: I get downvoted to oblivion whenever I mention this usecase on HN. Its no different this time but so be it (given the negative karma I have ratched up, I wonder why the thread is even visible. Perhaps because many have commented on it. A new HN UI feature, I suppose).

FF is the only browser that has worked well with this rather unusual usage pattern, so am ever so thankful to Mozilla folks. I do a lot of reading and it seriously helps. For those who are feeling exceptionally trigger happy, its not that unusual an usage pattern if you ask around.

abhinavk• 9 years ago

Firefox has a configurable upper limit through setting dom.ipc.processCount in about:config. Firefox 55 might expose this in its preferences.

detaro• 9 years ago

Not 800, but I've had e10s enabled for quite a while and it made the difference between "freezes up regularly" and "completely fine" with hundreds of tabs for me.

mwidell• 9 years ago

Just out of curiosity, why would you want to have 800 open tabs? What is your workflow? Do you use tabs as bookmarks? How do you find open tabs?

srean5• 9 years ago

Yeah they are like a volatile bookmarks with a traversable history and a 'this is very interesting but have to save the reading for later' todo list.

Once you bookmark a link the history-browsing-trajectory is lost. However once I visit a tab often it becomes a bookmark.

There are extensions to organize and search bookmarks.

jacquesm• 9 years ago

I'm in much the same boat as srean, I do online research on some subject (new subject every week) and open tabs are my way of remembering what I still need to read and keep notes from. 100's of tabs open is really no exception, especially not for subjects with a large online footprint.

I use the tree-style tabs plug in and scrapbook to keep my sanity.

raimue• 9 years ago

I assume you did not open these tabs in a single browsing session. For quite a while, Firefox will not load and render all tabs on session restore, but that happens once you switch to such a tab. Therefore I would guess that these 800 "inactive" tabs will not add that much overhead no matter whether e10s is enabled.

srean5• 9 years ago

Indeed. No, they accumulate over months. The count fluctuates of course, ~800 is approximately the steady state.

For quite a while, Firefox will not load and render all tabs on session restore

Absolutely, and this behavior is just fantastic for my use. Not that it crashes often, sometime I deliberately kill it if I need the memory for some analysis I am running.

TheGrassyKnoll• 9 years ago

Tab hoarder myself (got 559 on Firefox 54.0 right now). Its just laziness/skatter-braineded-ness. Cutting it down becomes a chore kinda like cleaning out your inbox.

nolok• 9 years ago

If you could be bothered to read the article, their approach and solution to this problem is detailed the third paragraph. If you don't bother reading, please abstain from asking question that are so clearly answered ...

srean5• 9 years ago

You caught me there. Nowadays I read the comments first before I read the actual post.

jvzr• 9 years ago

And you reply as well, which may the worst offense of the two. Albeit an insignificantly small offense in the grand scheme of things.

jwilk• 9 years ago

From the HN guidelines:

Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article.

teh_klev• 9 years ago

If you could be bothered to read the article

Steady on there..

From: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."

sctb• 9 years ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14552088 and marked it off-topic.

mikeecb2• 9 years ago

One of the reasons the Chrome browser uses one process per tab is so that memory between web-pages is isolated. By doing this, an attacker in control of a renderer process cannot read data from another renderer process (web-page).

It seems like Firefox has made a security / memory tradeoff here since renderer processes can render multiple (4 by default) web-pages at a time.

teraflop• 9 years ago

Chrome doesn't strictly follow the one-process-per-tab rule either. If you browse for a while with a bunch of tabs open, and then check Chrome's Task Manager, you'll see that it's quite common for a single process to render tabs from multiple different domains.

oblio• 9 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14549100

chimeracoder• 9 years ago

One of the reasons the Chrome browser uses one process per tab

Chrome does not use a process per tab. It uses a process per domain (mostly), unless you middle click a link in which case it always shares the same process as the original tab.

mikeecb2• 9 years ago

They've made efforts to make it more isolated though [1]. It seems like Firefox isn't going in this direction.

[1] https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/site-is...

bzbarsky2• 9 years ago

It uses a process per domain (mostly)

No, that's not quite right. What they do really is closer to proces-per-tab (with some complications around cross-site navigation) unless you have more than some number of tabs, in which case they will just have them share processes. See https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/process... and note that the default is to put multiple "independent" instances of the same site in different processes, even though they're same-domain. What you're describing is the non-default "Process-per-site" model.

unless you middle click a link in which case it always shares the same process as the original tab

I believe they changed that behavior starting with Chrome 60. See https://codereview.chromium.org/2680353005/ which talks about ctrl-click, but I would assume (watch me turn out to be wrong!) that middle-click takes the same codepath.

thnhtnhnhn• 9 years ago

Correction: Firefox doesn't use n content processes which render 4 tabs each. By default, it uses 4 content processes which share the task of rendering your n tabs. (AFAIK, at creation time, each tab is assigned one of those rendering processes.)

dezzeus3• 9 years ago

I've given it a try, but macOS's "activity monitor" reports a very high energy consumption, so to me it's a big no (being on a laptop).

I've filled a "feedback" about that within the browser UI…

cptskippy• 9 years ago

That's largely true of any browser that isn't Safari on MacOS or Edge on Windows 10.

dezzeus3• 9 years ago

That's sadly true, but the reported values were pretty high (~45), even when in idle (~15) with a couple of tabs.

At the moment my "sweet spot" is on Opera with the "battery saver" mode.

RockyMcNuts• 9 years ago

Now it can end battery life as we know it even faster. (On Mac it pegs CPU multiple times a day and I have to kill it. Never happens with Chrome)

jswny• 9 years ago

This sounds fantastic and I really can't wait to try it! However, does anyone else find themselves unable to switch away from Chrome due to the slickness? I find the overall design (and especially the design of the tabs) to be far more slick in Chrome than in Firefox. For me, the Firefox interface just feels dated and cluttered compared to the clean experience of Chrome. However, I am very wary of relying on Google for so many things so I'm absolutely going to give this new Firefox version a try.

FnuGk• 9 years ago

I am a long time firefox user and i feel that firefox looks better than chrome. So it might just be what you are used to.

Also i am on macOS, maybe firefox doesnt look as good on your platform?

ungzd• 9 years ago

In theory, moving to multiple content processes will improve stability and performance (one bad tab won't slow down the rest of your computer)

So starting more processes makes other apps (not firefox) less slow? Are Arstechnica authors at least experienced PC users and know what is process, what is web browser? Do they use IE or Safari because it's default and it's an icon for internet? I wonder how high level of tech incompetence in all these tech press. Just mindless rewording of release notes every time.

Also, regarding that diagram: in fact, multiple Chrome tabs can be handled by single process, you can see it in Chrome's task manager.

majewsky• 9 years ago

I suppose they're including the other tabs in that browser in their definition of "the rest of your computer", which seems very reasonable.

Firefox 54 goes multi-process, eight years after work began

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