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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

#61

Post by tomp »

rsp1984 wrote: 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…

Nevertheless, I prefer Chrome's approach. I can just open the process explorer and kill a few of the most memory hungry tabs/tab groups; with Firefox, there's no other solution than killing the whole browser.

Can't wait for this fix!

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

#62

Post by tdkl »

nl wrote: 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'…

> but I was trying to reduce my Google dependencies.

Get Chromium.

http://chromium.woolyss.com/

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

#63

Post by _dark_matter_ »

scrollaway wrote: post #52
nl wrote: 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'…

Firefox is frustratingly slow for me. I can't use it, have to stick to Chrome. Chrome which, by the way, crashes after 5 minutes of using video Hangouts and brings my 16 gigabytes ram PC to a halt when I open too many youtube tabs. But firefox scrolling is especially slow. irccloud.com is the main culprit (and I use irccloud a lot). It's pretty bad in gmail as well. The react app my team is working on is also far slo…

This is super surprising to me, because irccloud is exactly what we use at Mozilla. Everyone seems happy with it's performance, and obviously most people are using FF.

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

#64

Post by azinman2 »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #38
toxican wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And they're still at it, too: https://areweslimyet.com/

Maybe I'm misreading things but it looks like it's been constantly getting worse since 2012?

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

#65

Post by dxxvi »

0xfeba wrote: post #40
nl wrote: 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'…

Funny, I have the same lockups with Chrome. Middle-clicking a new link (to open in a new tab) freezes the entire browser (all tabs) until the new tab is done loading. I believe it's a extension problem (uBlock Origin, EFF Privacy Badger), but I don't really want to get rid of any of them.

I know this is not about ad blockers, but does anybody have any experience of using something like https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts/blob/master/hosts instead of uBlock Origin? Or even use it in the hosts file of our dd-wrt/openwrt routers?

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

#66

Post by kohanz »

rsp1984 wrote: 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…

I was in the same situation as you and found that in the end Safari fit that bill for me (not sure if it is an option on your platform). Responsiveness is probably somewhere between Chrome and FF, but memory usage has been much better.

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

#67

Post by marcosdumay »

eatbitseveryday wrote: post #57
addicted wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JavaScript was little more than a toy scripting language used to animate stuff and change layouts when html/Css wouldn't fit for the greatest part of firefox's early existence. At the time it was probably the appropriate decision. Now, it's a huge burden on Firefox and it's good to finally see progress on this front.

Since Javascript is just a language that happens to execute client-side within the browser, why can we not use an existing language syntax (or an existing language entirely) for this purpose? For example, Go, Python, Rust, or perhaps Perl? It feels like a broken shell scripting language that really should have been replaced.

See WebAssembly, WebAsm, and probably another dozen similarly named projects.

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

#68

Post by FT_intern »

nl wrote: 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'…

Firefox has been painfully slower than Chrome by great magnitudes for me on a cheap Dell Windows laptop. I have almost identical extensions except for NoScript which might be the culprit, although it is also the main reason why I use FF over Chrome (and for enabled extensions on private mode, which defeats the purpose of private mode but it has been used more as a "don't save history" mode than private mode if you know what I mean).

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

#69

Post by gareim »

dogma1138 wrote: post #42
formula1 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing that firefox does well is suspend pages you are not using and likely saving the state of the appllication to the disk. Another thing can be for when multiple pages use the same or similar javascript/css/external respurce files, they only need to be loaded once into memory. Another thing canbe that certain javascript globals would only be loaded when the getter asks for them. Something like AudioContext and…

If that's that case I much rather my browser eat up more RAM than needlessly write to my SSD. A lot of the improvement in the reliability of consumer grade SSDs is due to OS improvements in how they manage their write operations to the hard drive. Windows is considerably more conservative in how it uses it's page file and what does it write off to the SSD, linux has also made a lot of improvements in how it uses the…

While I agree that I would rather my browser use more RAM than constantly suspend pages, I disagree with your notion that

>A lot of the improvement in the reliability of consumer grade SSDs is due to OS improvements in how they manage their write operations to the hard drive.

We're talking on the scale of writing 500gb to your SSD every single day for 10 years in order to reach their endurance limit (on average). Writing a few more gb at worst from your browser is hardly going to affect that. It's even doubtful that OS improvements change it much, as Windows 7, which a lot of people are still on, doesn't come SSD optimized.

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

#70

Post by alyandon »

marcosdumay wrote: post #60
toxican wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Funniest thing is that FF memory usage didn't go down that much. For me it is even higher.

I'm currently at a little over 1 GB with 8 tabs open.

I really wish I had the option to trade off responsiveness for memory usage by being able to mark tabs as "no background activity allowed" so FF could serialize that content to disk when the tab isn't in focus.

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