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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

#331
post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm also a little surprised there hasn't been an attempt to launch a completely new Firefox from the ground up. It's interesting how the history goes. We had Netscape 4, and it was crap (remember when resizing a window reloaded the whole page?) So they was a ground-up rewrite of the rendering engine, resulting in Gecko, which was put in Mozilla. Gecko was great but Mozilla was a bloaty amalgamation of features, so…

A few additions: KHTML was originally forked from QHtml (part of Qt) I believe (or they shared the same origin?). Webkit later became a Qt component, the circle of life. I would argue chromes biggest innovation was the UI, putting the address bar as part of the tab where it belongs (cue holy war) and better tabbing in general. Mozilla was also the first to integrate the search and address fields, which they unfortuna…

> Mozilla was also the first to integrate the search and address fields, which they unfortunately stripped out of firefox (and many people think chrome introduced it).

Do you know when this was introduced/removed? I'm curious as to what this implementation was as I don't recall when this happened.

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

#332
post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm also a little surprised there hasn't been an attempt to launch a completely new Firefox from the ground up. It's interesting how the history goes. We had Netscape 4, and it was crap (remember when resizing a window reloaded the whole page?) So they was a ground-up rewrite of the rendering engine, resulting in Gecko, which was put in Mozilla. Gecko was great but Mozilla was a bloaty amalgamation of features, so…

A few additions: KHTML was originally forked from QHtml (part of Qt) I believe (or they shared the same origin?). Webkit later became a Qt component, the circle of life. I would argue chromes biggest innovation was the UI, putting the address bar as part of the tab where it belongs (cue holy war) and better tabbing in general. Mozilla was also the first to integrate the search and address fields, which they unfortuna…

> Mozilla was also the first to integrate the search and address fields

I always attributed this to Opera but I may be wrong

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

#333

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.

What about using incompatible addons triggers a slow browsing experience?

I think it has to do with some kind of global locking/racing conditions.

The current version of LastPass is a big culprit, I've had it lock up nightly for >30s some times. They have a beta version that is e10s compatible which doesn't have this problem.

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

#334
post #331
post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few additions: KHTML was originally forked from QHtml (part of Qt) I believe (or they shared the same origin?). Webkit later became a Qt component, the circle of life. I would argue chromes biggest innovation was the UI, putting the address bar as part of the tab where it belongs (cue holy war) and better tabbing in general. Mozilla was also the first to integrate the search and address fields, which they unfortuna…

> Mozilla was also the first to integrate the search and address fields, which they unfortunately stripped out of firefox (and many people think chrome introduced it). Do you know when this was introduced/removed? I'm curious as to what this implementation was as I don't recall when this happened.

It was in all versions of the Mozilla suite: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Application_Suite . It was never a feature of Firefox.

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

#335
post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can second the energy efficient thing, at least in Linux. I've been tracking lots of programs with powertop, including many browsers, in the quest of an efficient desktop and Firefox is pretty good. I also appreciate its great plugins. With vimperator I can configure Firefox using a dotfile, and setup lots of neat things like: 1. A ssh proxy mode that also routes DNS queries set! network.proxy.socks=localhost set!…

Could you please give a little more info about ssh through vimperator? Can it do local port forwarding? I couldn't find much doing a google search for "vimperator ssh".

It can do anything Firefox can, it's just a shortcut using Javascript, nothing Vimperator-specific.

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

#336
post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox has gotten much more stable over recent years in regards to having excessive amounts of tabs open. I can have over 300 tabs open and it's stable (I was using Waterfox when doing this in Windows though).

What has Waterfox so special? I skimmed it's homepage but it only says "we're fast!", doesn't explain how and why though.

At the time I was using it (about a year ago) it was essentially a 64 bit build of Firefox.

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

#337
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not cheap at all, because buying the physical chips is not the end of it. For some laptops - like macbook air - there is a limit of how much they support, and it's not that high. Some models are not even upgradable - they just have soldered-in 8G and that's it. > you need to close some tabs This comment is really not contributing anything to the matter. Obviously everybody could think of closing tabs without…

If the available laptops don't support enough ram, then the consumer has spoken, and what they said was that they don't want more ram or 1000 tabs open on their laptop. Personally I wouldn't buy a laptop that is incapable of supporting the amount of ram that I need for my "work pattern".

I want a laptop of infinite memory, infinite disk space, battery size so big I have to charge it once a decade and that it's cost me $10. But clearly not all consumer wishes are possible. There are some tradeoffs, and one has to operate within the constraints of reality, not wishes.

> Personally I wouldn't buy a laptop that is incapable of supporting the amount of ram that I need for my "work pattern".

Clearly you've got it all figured out. Too bad not everybody can be you, otherwise we wouldn't have any tradeoffs to deal with.

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

#338
post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My hardware doesn't improve exponentially. In fact, my current work laptop has less memory (8G) than my previous one (16G) or previous desktop machine (also 16G). And it mostly works with Chrome, but I stopped using Firefox because my habit of opening dozens of tabs led to stratospheric memory usages that killed even 16G machines. That was somewhere in 2013, looks like it's even worse now?

> my current work laptop has less memory (8G) than my previous one (16G) That indicates really poor buying decisions! I'm curious about why would this happen.

That you for your evaluation of my buying decisions! With absolutely no information except one data point about memory side you were able to conclude they were bad, this is remarkable. Has nothing to do with the point in question (that memory capabilities aren't nearly growing exponentially, not lately) but still very remarkable insight.

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

#339
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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). Wri…

last time I checked most SSD come with ~72TB warranty. Go above that and you are sol.

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

#340
post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> my current work laptop has less memory (8G) than my previous one (16G) That indicates really poor buying decisions! I'm curious about why would this happen.

That you for your evaluation of my buying decisions! With absolutely no information except one data point about memory side you were able to conclude they were bad, this is remarkable. Has nothing to do with the point in question (that memory capabilities aren't nearly growing exponentially, not lately) but still very remarkable insight.

I assumed your workplace made the decision and not you. Sorry for appearing to criticize your decisions. I'm still curious why you downgraded to a machine with less memory.
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