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Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness

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Re: Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness

#21

Is there a list of commonly used extensions that are (in)compatible?

http://arewee10syet.com/ has a list of addons and their compatibility.

I tried turning on the about:config option and the URL bar broke, so obviously something I have is incompatible - I suspect it's Classic Theme Restorer, although that site does list it as compatible.

Re: Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness

#22

Its incredible multi-process took this long. Just goes to show you that your architecture decisions last a long time and are often difficult to change. Chrome had this from day one and never had a big and old codebase to worry about. Yet it took Firefox many years to get multi-process going and my understanding is that its much more limited and simpler than what Chrome or Edge do. I'm also a little surprised there ha…

|| I'm also a little surprised there hasn't been an attempt to launch a completely new Firefox from the ground up.

I (hopefully) think this is what Servo is and will end up being. Has no legacy code, and is tiny in comparison to Gecko. It's OS support is fairly modern, and has no interest in supporting Windows XP. It's also written in such a way that allows them to be more multi-threaded and more concurrent than traditional rendering engines.

At some point you have to draw a line in the sand and start again, and I hope Servo is that.

You can check out https://github.com/browserhtml/browserhtml which is servo running standalone

Re: Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness

#23
post #19

“We can learn from the competition,” said Dotzler. “The way they implemented multi-process is RAM-intensive, it can get out of hand. We are learning from them and building an architecture that doesn’t eat all your RAM.” That's the money quote here. I've been waiting for this for a long time actually. Every browser I've tried except Firefox just basically eats all my RAM and other app performance (e.g. compiling stuff…

A few years ago if you'd told me FF would be the RAM-sensitive browser, I'd have laughed you off the internet.

Re: Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness

#24

Its incredible multi-process took this long. Just goes to show you that your architecture decisions last a long time and are often difficult to change. Chrome had this from day one and never had a big and old codebase to worry about. Yet it took Firefox many years to get multi-process going and my understanding is that its much more limited and simpler than what Chrome or Edge do. I'm also a little surprised there ha…

> I'm also a little surprised there hasn't been an attempt to launch a completely new Firefox from the ground up.

Check out Servo: https://servo.org/

Re: Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness

#25
I'm surprised by the responsiveness claims because my ancient Windows PC runs FF superbly. I think Win10+FF is already more responsive now than it has ever been.

I am also using Ghostery, however, with virtually everything blocked. It wasn't my intent to block ads, but that's mostly how it works out.

Re: Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness

#26
post #7

I switched to Firefox from Chrome about 12 months ago. It isn't as good as Chrome, but I was trying to reduce my Google dependencies. It has been mostly fine (except for an annoying OS-X multi-screen bug where it screws up the sizing). I was really looking forward to this feature to help close the gap on Chrome performance. Until August (I think Firefox 48.x), when it became unusable on any site with... something. I'…

For me, disabling JS by default was the culprit. I only turn it on for sites that actually need it, and it seems to work much better. YMMV of course

Re: Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness

#28
post #19

“We can learn from the competition,” said Dotzler. “The way they implemented multi-process is RAM-intensive, it can get out of hand. We are learning from them and building an architecture that doesn’t eat all your RAM.” That's the money quote here. I've been waiting for this for a long time actually. Every browser I've tried except Firefox just basically eats all my RAM and other app performance (e.g. compiling stuff…

Can someone describe what the "architecture that doesn't eat all your RAM" here is? Is it possible that it will inadvertently provide weaker security protections between tabs than the more naive and RAM-intensive architecture?

Re: Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness

#30
post #7

I switched to Firefox from Chrome about 12 months ago. It isn't as good as Chrome, but I was trying to reduce my Google dependencies. It has been mostly fine (except for an annoying OS-X multi-screen bug where it screws up the sizing). I was really looking forward to this feature to help close the gap on Chrome performance. Until August (I think Firefox 48.x), when it became unusable on any site with... something. I'…

Firebug is quite often the culprit in these kinds of things in my experience. I can't live without it so I put up with it; if you're switching from Chrome however, it seems that you'd be better off just using the built-in inspection.

Yes. I don't know if this is still the case, but Firebug used to disable SpiderMonkey's JIT, even when not using Firebug:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/firebug/q2fuUraVDk8

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