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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

#191
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…

Android or iOS? I have no such complaint on Android - I usually load the pages that interest me in separate tabs and then read them offline.

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

#192
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been a long time Firefox user (due to multi-row tab extension -- can't live without it). I can easily have 120 tabs open when doing research. Firefox has always been relatively performant even with that huge number of tabs visible and I almost never have to close it. However, something recently has changed. Firefox will work fine and then something will cause it use a large amount of CPU that it doesn't let go o…

> I've been a long time Firefox user (due to multi-row tab extension -- can't live without it). Which one do you use? There are several.

Tab mix plus

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

#193
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are several addons that do this. I think Suspend Tab is the most popular. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/suspend-tab/

I use the same on Chrome, nice memory saver.

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

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

A few people use Tree-Style Tabs, which organize them as a tree structure, similar to directories. It encourages using tabs instead of bookmarks, which have a terrible UX (in all browsers, not picking on Firefox here). https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

Tree Style Tabs is the primary reason why I stick with Firefox. Without it, I wouldn't even know where to begin managing the relevant sites/info I encounter when reading up on diverging lines-of-thought.

For me, it is /the/ absolute killer feature for browsers.

---Alex

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

#195

Instructions for enabling this feature (via about:config) are provided in the author's prior article on the topic: https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/10/mozillas-multi-process-arc...

Please be aware that if you force-enable e10s while using incompatible addons, you'll end up with a very slow browsing experience. http://arewee10syet.com/ has a compatibility list for some of the most popular addons.

Seems like e10s gets disabled if there is a incompatible addon activated.

Not sure I would trust that list, the only two addons I run, is Tree Style Tab and Greasemonkey, both listed as compatible on the website, but going to about:support shows:

> Multiprocess Windows 0/1 (Disabled by add-ons)

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

#196

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/

As a fully rewritten browser engine, how will they handle malformed HTML? Will it, like other browsers, try to 'understand' and fix some errors or will it stick to the specification?

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

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only is this false, but completely ignores troves of older hardware existing in people's homes that has to run browsers just as well. The average consumer hardware improves at nowhere near exponential rate (although I guess it depends on the timescale and your willingness to fudge the graph to sparse data points).

>completely ignores troves of older hardware existing in people's homes that has to run browsers just as well. The performance has gotten worse for users of a computer from 2006, but it has improved for users of ten-year old computers (since a ten-year old computer in 2012 would have been from 2002). If you assume that a computer is less likely to be used the older it gets (and that this rate is roughly stable), then…

> The performance has gotten worse for users of a computer from 2006, but it has improved for users of ten-year old computers

I'm not sure I follow that logic.

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

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That last link looks about the same to me in Chrome dev and Firefox nightly, for what it's worth.

It's 5-10 fps in Firefox Nightly for me, and 50-60 fps in Chrome Canary, on OS X.

How do you measure fps? Is there an add-on for that?

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

#199
post #62
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/

Chromium would be great if it had a decent library of extensions like Firefox. As is, I'll stick with the latter.

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

#200
post #62
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/

Also make sure you've got the Google services turned off in Settings/Privacy.
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