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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

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Have you given the built-in Firefox dev tools a try? If so, what did you feel was missing?

Really just that I've used Firebug for so long that using anything else is painful. I've tried switching but always ended up going back. Much of it is interface differences, but some of it is actual differences in functionality: if Firebug has something which another inspector does not, then it's super-frustrating. If another inspector has something that Firebug lacks, then I don't even notice.

Edit: I should emphasize that I'm not saying Firebug is superior, just that I'm used to it.

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

#162
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main reason tabs aren't saved to disk isn't a concern about responsiveness, it is a concern about data loss. You have to be very sure that you restore the state exactly. What if you spent a few hours filling out some government form online, then you went and took a break by watching a few YouTube videos? Memory usage might spike up, and the browser decides to unload the tab with the form. You'd be mad if form sta…

FF mobile does this and it drives me nuts. I'll be on 4chan, watch a YT clip, then tab back and FF reloads the original HTML. Apart from being slow (takes a few seconds to rerender it all), it also loses AJAX-loaded data. My phone reports it has 600MB of RAM free, so I dunno what's causing FF's behaviour here nor how to disable it. I can't always reproduce it, but it happens enough that every browsing session has som…

All the mobile browsers I've tried do this - Firefox, Dolphin, and stock Android. I distinctly remember browsing the web quite happily with Firefox desktop on a machine with 512 MB of RAM as recently as 2008, so I can't help but feel we've gone backwards.

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

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm at 2.9G virtual 1.277g resident with about 130 tabs open (yeah, I'm a goofball but I like my tabs). It's pretty responsive on a thinkpad x220 i5-2540M @ 2.6ghz, 8G of ram and an SSD.

Not even criticizing, but how do you manage 130 tabs? How do you find tabs you're looking for? You must have some kind of system!

Not sure how he does it, but I don't manage those. I just don't close tabs (I usually forget to do it :), so after week or two I end up with 200-300 tabs (my record is 900).

I tried to use chrome once and it ate all my ram, and they were saying it uses less ram then firefox back then.

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

#164
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're getting worse at a linear pace, while hardware improves exponentially. Effectively that's a pretty good improvement each year.

Hardware does not get exponetially better. Maybe it did in 90ties and 00ers. Right now hardwardware gets slimmer, less power consuming and cheaper. But not better. My 12 year old (then mid-end gaming pc) is pretty much exactly as fast as my current, 2(?) year old office machine. (x264 and other mulit-threaed cpu benchbmarks) But it costs a fraction and uses next to no energy. /edit: Yes this is wrong. I made a mistak…

Your 12 years old pentium 4 (or whatever) likely has 1 core and 1 thread, which is immensely noticeable even compared to the lower end modern 2 cores/4 threads machines (let alone 4/8 mid level modern desktops).

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

#165
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'…

I occasionally experience similar slowness. In my case, it's caused by bloated sqlite database. After I delete all history, the browser is snappy again.

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

#166
post #159
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hardware does not get exponetially better. Maybe it did in 90ties and 00ers. Right now hardwardware gets slimmer, less power consuming and cheaper. But not better. My 12 year old (then mid-end gaming pc) is pretty much exactly as fast as my current, 2(?) year old office machine. (x264 and other mulit-threaed cpu benchbmarks) But it costs a fraction and uses next to no energy. /edit: Yes this is wrong. I made a mistak…

Love the redundancy of "90ties", but what's the etymology of "00ers"?

Augts?

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

#167

Ah, so because I use addons I might not be seeing these benefits for some time? Good to know. Chrome is right now way faster for me, but I prefer using FF so I am in the Mozilla camp right now. Eager to see this rolled out. Early versions of e10s were very fragile and not so usable for me, so I switched it off.

I use quite a few add-ons and my e10 was disabled because of them. I force enabled e10 using Mozilla's guide https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Force_Enable and didn't notice anything breaking (yet).

It's usually less so things breaking and rather just being slow. For example, if you use NoScript, it often takes really long to load up a page, because that's when NoScript becomes active, and because NoScript isn't yet properly e10s-compatible, it just forces Firefox to do things in a single-process way. But that actually makes things slower than when Firefox is running without e10s.

about:performance is a rather good indicator, if an add-on is causing slow-downs.

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

#169

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.

It depends on operating system. For instance on OSX Yosemite Firefox is sluggish, yet on Windows 10 it's fast. People should really mention what operating system they're running when they say "x is slow"

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

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except mobile hardware which does not. Power usage is always a concern.

Power usage has little to do with memory usage. In fact, if the browser is using more RAM as a cache, it won't hit persistent storage as much, which actually increases battery life.

Browser are caching web content, not much persistent storage content... and the OS does persistent storage caching fine, typically no need to try to add your own (poor) layer to do that.
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