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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

#231

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…

Meh. SSD write amounts matter if you're running a datacenter. They don't matter to a normal user on a laptop/desktop using a browser. SSD lifetime simply isn't an issue, as the other commenter pointed out.

Also, from a more philosophical standpoint - this isn't Mozilla's issue. They shouldn't have to worry about conserving SSD writes. That's not their problem. That's the OS / Disk firmware / manufacturer's problem. If I want to write files to the disk at a very reasonable rate, I should feel free to do that.

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

#232
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What addons do you have installed, and what OS are you using?

ArchLinux 64 https://i.imgur.com/sDqs24a.png

I don't know if anything has changed, but tree style tab gave me terrible memory leaks.

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

#233
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found Firefox performance to be absolutely awful at work on OS X. I have no issues at all with it at home on Linux, and didn't have any issues in my previous job on OS X either. I'm not sure if it's OS X specific, a change in recent versions, this laptop being underpowered, or the nature of the work I do (a lot of video stuff), but anything JS heavy severely slows down or locks up the browser. And if anything, i…

For a while now I've suspected that memory management on OS X is actually terrible. I have no really proof, because I just run everything memory intensive on Linux. At work I have a few Python script that eats a few gigabytes of memory, it reads in data, and basically just loops over it, selects the stuff it needs an generate a few XML file (10 to 20MB worth of XML). All this takes maybe five minutes on Linux, on Mac…

    Chrome does have the better Javascript engine, still, I believe that much of the slow Javascript on Firefox (an other browsers) could be avoided if people bothered testing a little more.
All major engines are pretty much comparable speed-wise. The biggest difference is probably in memory management (of the HTML & JS engines), which may favor some forms of site/lib structure and architecture over others – that's IMHO where the majority of slowness comes from (for any browser).

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

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's interesting because for me the Windows task manger reports 377MB with 10 tabs open, some of them are news sites that tends to be "heavy".

edit: oh, I'm using ad blocking add-on and maybe you don't, that could be one reason, besides different websites another reason could be that you have the browser open longer than me.

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

#235
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 found ads to be a major hog (and some bad scrolling scripts on popular or design-y sites). I'm using uBlock Origin or Adblock Plus, which gives a great responsiveness boost for far too many websites.

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

#236
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…

Do you have the latest graphics drivers? Some are really buggy and may be (one of) the cause(s).

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

#237
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 kn…

Did you try updating your graphics drivers? Sometimes bad drivers cause sluggishness.

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

#238
post #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.

Mind filing a bug with specifics at bugzilla.mozilla.org? There's probably some low-hanging fruit there …

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

#239
post #16
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've found Firefox performance to be absolutely awful at work on OS X. I have no issues at all with it at home on Linux, and didn't have any issues in my previous job on OS X either. I'm not sure if it's OS X specific, a change in recent versions, this laptop being underpowered, or the nature of the work I do (a lot of video stuff), but anything JS heavy severely slows down or locks up the browser. And if anything, i…

I've actually had the opposite experience. I work on Firefox support for a very heavy Angular2 app, and I usually see 2-3x faster reflows on OS X (and Windows) than on Linux, and faster paints too (although I haven't taken exact numbers, since reflows are the bottleneck). It seems that at least the graphics pipeline is much better optimized for OS X/Windows than Linux.

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

#240
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Addons are not supported by default in e10s mode on the release channel yet.
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