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News Mozilla details Firefox multi-process roadmap

Discussion in 'Article Discussion' started by Gareth Halfacree, 23 Dec 2016.

  1. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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  2. RedFlames

    RedFlames ...is not a Belgian football team

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    It's only taken them 7 years to get it to this point [e10s/multi-process support iirc first came up as a thing in 2009... and was still being worked on and 'coming soon' [broken] when i gave up on Mozilla/Firefox in 2011]... so they might have it all finished and working 'properly' [ie not breaking all the things whenever it's turned on] sometime this side of the heat death of the universe...
     
  3. impar

    impar Minimodder

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    Greetings!

    You could run a multi-process Firefox for most of 2016, stable version, not Beta\Aurora. I did.
    Just had to change "browser.tabs.remote.autostart" to true; create "browser.tabs.remote.force-enable" and put it at true. Both serve to activate separate content and engine processes.
    Then choose how many content processes you want to use by altering "dom.ipc.processCount".

    Downside was that some addons stopped working. Had to find alternatives. Do note that there is no warning addons stopped working.
     
  4. RedFlames

    RedFlames ...is not a Belgian football team

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    I know all about that, and the article does mention it too, including the bit about it borking certain extensions. And whilst it may have worked for you, anything you have to root around in about:config to enable, isn't meant for daily driver use.

    But Electrolysis, after 7 years of them hacking away at it, it still doesn't work as they intended it which is essentially a carbon copy of how Chrome does it, If i remember rightly their first stab at it was simply copying the relevant Chromium [the open source project behind Chrome] source and then trying to shoehorn it into Firefox [and again iirc it wasn't the only thing they just copypasta'd from Chromium].

    When I gave up on Firefox/Mozilla it seemed like they'd got stuck with a kind of 'Google are doing it, we should too' tunnel-vision, and I think, to an extent, they still have it. But then again the Places debacle [which was meant to be a sort of combined one stop shop for history and bookmarks, after a few years of work they quietly binned it because it a: didn't work and b: ended up breaking a multitude of other things in the browser] had me jaded long before then.
     
  5. impar

    impar Minimodder

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    Greetings!
    It has been quite stable, it hasnt crashed and I only close Firefox when W10 reboots. It was a pain testing new addons with the same capabilities as the ones that stopped working, but the extra speed and responsiveness (especially this) was worth it.
    Which might be a problem for me. With my heavy tab use Chrome eats too much RAM and becomes too slow.
    Yeah... The next big test is when Mozilla drops support for the old addons and focus on the Webextensions, which are more limited to what can be done to the browser itself.
     
  6. Wwhat

    Wwhat Minimodder

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    I do not feel I have a great need for it, nor do I see a reason to get enthusiastic about the years of inevitable exploits resulting from this.
     
  7. leexgx

    leexgx CPC hang out zone (i Fix pcs i do )

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    interesting post

    per page process means each page has its own sandbox (more secure than 1 single process) , the current way firefox handles stuff is all under one process if one page crashes the browser it closes every thing (does have recover but its annoying) also multiprocess means 1 page won't slow all other tabs down
     
  8. kwerboom

    kwerboom What's a Dremel?

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    No, this is really happening this coming year. The reason Mozilla has been so slow at multi-process has been because of Windows XP support, legacy add-ons, and the Gecko engine.

    The tech press doesn't give the same level of coverage to Mozilla Firefox as it does Google Chrome. A lot has been going on with Firefox development this past year.

    As ghacks reported in their article "Firefox 53: no support for Windows XP or Vista", Windows XP and Vista users will be shunted on to ESR 52 while 53 and newer will only work on Windows 7 or newer. The main bug report for this is 1130266, but it also affects multi-process work (called e10s) on bug report 1296279.

    Furthermore, Mozilla is dropping its legacy add-ons for WebExtensions support. As this Add-ons Blog article about state of add-ons in 2017, Mozilla will stop accepting unsigned non-WebExtensions add-ons 53, so that Mozilla can start making underlying changes to the actual platform.

    Finally, one of those big changes to the platform coming to Firefox is switching from Gecko to Quantum. Mozilla's Gecko engine is long in the tooth and Mozilla has been experimenting with the new Servo engine written in the Rust language. Quantum barrows from Servo and Gecko to make something modern and more efficient. There was a Medium article and a blog post by Bill McCloskey about it.
     
  9. impar

    impar Minimodder

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    Greetings!
    Whats the point on moving to WebExtensions that have less (current) capabilities?
    Why kill CTR, NoScript, TreeStyleTabs...
     
  10. kwerboom

    kwerboom What's a Dremel?

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    I explained that in my prior post. Moving to a new browser engine and multi-process requires the change. The old add-ons system was locked to the internals of the Gecko engine (Legacy Overlay Extensions) or was limited to single process (Add-on SDK Low-Level APIs). WebExtensions by design are engine agnostic and high level APIs that don't care about number of processes in use. I don't like it either but this is the price of progress. Mozilla does seem to be trying to move some of its major add-ons from legacy to WebExtensions (Bug 121473 - "Support NoScript as a WebExtension").
     
  11. impar

    impar Minimodder

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  12. kwerboom

    kwerboom What's a Dremel?

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  13. impar

    impar Minimodder

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    Greetings!
    It is.
     

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