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Update on Multi-Process Firefox

blog.mozilla.org

1–10 of 175 posts

Re: Update on Multi-Process Firefox

#2
I force-enabled multi-process FF a while ago and haven't had any issues. In the 49.x series there were one or two tab crashes, but I can't think of any recently. All of my extensions have worked just fine too.

Re: Update on Multi-Process Firefox

#3
Does firefox run each tab in its own process yet? Or live inside a sandbox? I switched from firefox + noscript to chrome after accepting that firefox's security (even with noscript enabled) was just so far behind that of chrome.

Re: Update on Multi-Process Firefox

#4
post #3

Does firefox run each tab in its own process yet? Or live inside a sandbox? I switched from firefox + noscript to chrome after accepting that firefox's security (even with noscript enabled) was just so far behind that of chrome.

You could enable it for quite a while already, but currently the content processes are still using a process pool of 1.

Re: Update on Multi-Process Firefox

#5
post #4
post #3

Does firefox run each tab in its own process yet? Or live inside a sandbox? I switched from firefox + noscript to chrome after accepting that firefox's security (even with noscript enabled) was just so far behind that of chrome.

You could enable it for quite a while already, but currently the content processes are still using a process pool of 1.

And if you want so, the about:config key to fiddle with is called "dom.ipc.processCount" and currently defaults to 1, with plans to raise this soon, as described by the article.

EDIT also, to come back to DanBlake's question about whether Firefox now "run[s] each tab in its own process yet": no it doesn't; the architecture that was chosen is a process pool, available to all tabs. I won't elaborate much as you can find blogposts where Mozilla engineers detail why this design; IIRC it boils down to: it fulfills the security/performance objectives, and avoids a bit of overhead caused by the one-process-per-tab approach.

Re: Update on Multi-Process Firefox

#6
post #3

Does firefox run each tab in its own process yet? Or live inside a sandbox? I switched from firefox + noscript to chrome after accepting that firefox's security (even with noscript enabled) was just so far behind that of chrome.

Both of those topics are discussed in the blog post, btw.

Re: Update on Multi-Process Firefox

#7
post #3

Does firefox run each tab in its own process yet? Or live inside a sandbox? I switched from firefox + noscript to chrome after accepting that firefox's security (even with noscript enabled) was just so far behind that of chrome.

Isn't this exactly what the article explains and clarifies?

Re: Update on Multi-Process Firefox

#8
It would be really nice if the addons/extensions page showed which addons were listed as compatible and which weren't. I might thus make a decision to disable/delete an addon or two that were blocking me from using multiprocess firefox. As it is, I have no idea if my firefox is using multiprocess at all. All I know is that I use a lot of addons and I'm probably not, then, using multiprocess.

Re: Update on Multi-Process Firefox

#9
post #2

I force-enabled multi-process FF a while ago and haven't had any issues. In the 49.x series there were one or two tab crashes, but I can't think of any recently. All of my extensions have worked just fine too.

1Password unfortunately is still incompatible so force needs to be applied.

But in general I share your observation - runs very smooth.

Re: Update on Multi-Process Firefox

#10

It would be really nice if the addons/extensions page showed which addons were listed as compatible and which weren't. I might thus make a decision to disable/delete an addon or two that were blocking me from using multiprocess firefox. As it is, I have no idea if my firefox is using multiprocess at all. All I know is that I use a lot of addons and I'm probably not, then, using multiprocess.

You can see on the Add-ons Manager page if a particular add-on is compatible.

about:support shows you if multi-process is enabled " Multiprocess Windows".

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