Live data from Hacker News

Update on Multi-Process Firefox

blog.mozilla.org

91–100 of 175 posts

Re: Update on Multi-Process Firefox

#91
post #22

Does anyone have insight on why we're getting this for Firefox in (very late) 2016 while Chrome has had this since 2008 and IE since 2009? Seriously, I understand the need for competition in the browser, and wish there was a viable alternative to chrome on things that aren't Windows, but the failure of Firefox to keep pace is really disappointing. Slow and lacking basic features for years almost makes Firefox feel li…

Chrome was a greenfield product with no extension ecosystem to contend with.

Trying to overhaul the entire architecture of a browser with a huge extension ecosystem (and over a decade's worth of baggage associated with that) is hard.

Re: Update on Multi-Process Firefox

#92
post #89

Looks like accessibility tools (e.g. screen readers) also disable multi-process support as of Firefox 50. I know enough about accessibility APIs and their implementations to guess that it's going to be difficult to modify that code to work efficiently in a multi-process configuration.` Edit: I'm talking about Windows. Don't know about other platforms.

I'm the dev who is responsible for the Windows implementation. It has been quite the... gnarly experience to say the least. We were shooting for 52 for enabling a11y+e10s, but it is increasingly looking like we're going to need to slip to 53.

[deleted]

Re: Update on Multi-Process Firefox

#93
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need an add-on for that: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-compat... That's not enough though. In about:addons all my add-ons are listed as compatible, but about:support still says that multiprocess is "disabled by add-ons". So YMMV. EDIT: The gotcha is that the current release uses a whitelist of only about 20 extensions. If you have anything else, you need to force-enable the feature, even i…

Firefox: Trouble managing your addons? Here, have this other addon!

But don't worry, we've bundled all these other tools that nobody wants into FF itself!

Re: Update on Multi-Process Firefox

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it supports multi-browser, cross-platform and has way more features than FF sync.

Firefox Sync is cross-platform (it runs everywhere Firefox does), and it has every feature I want. What additional features do you want that it doesn't have?

Disclaimer: I'm writing this on Firefox. I was one of a couple of ten thousand people who donated money ten or so years ago for their famous NY Times ad when they were still going head-on against IE. I like them.

This being said: if their Sync platform works for you, great. Here are my reasons why I choose 1Password as my password manager:

1. It's made by a company that focuses exclusively on this one product. It's their raison d'être, not a side project.

2. They're old-fashioned in a way: they provide me with something, and I give them money for it. 1Password is not cheap, but very good value for money - for me.

3. I've been using it for over half a decade now. 1. and 2. together give me a good reason to believe I can continue to do so for a long time to come. This is in stark contrast to Mozilla, who have been throwing stuff against the wall for quite a while now and abandoning it whenever things do not pan out

4. Various sync options. I'm not required to trust any one "cloud" provider when it comes to privacy, security or continued availability

5. The 1Password vault format can actually be opened in a browser. Even if by some strange fluke I find myself without a client, I can simply download the file on pretty much every machine and still access my passwords

6. UI. 1Password is very well thought out, and that's an important thing for me for something I use about a couple dozen times every day.

While I cannot swear to it, I think I only paid twice over the last six years - the initial purchase plus one paid upgrade some time in the middle. I actually hope to pay for the next one; not only because of what I consider to be fair, but because I want them to do well and be around a long, long time.

And when it comes to security, I've seen HN's resident crypto luminary tptacek give it his thumbs-up. This is something I am not able to properly assess on my own, so his word is good enough for me.

Re: Update on Multi-Process Firefox

#95
post #22

Does anyone have insight on why we're getting this for Firefox in (very late) 2016 while Chrome has had this since 2008 and IE since 2009? Seriously, I understand the need for competition in the browser, and wish there was a viable alternative to chrome on things that aren't Windows, but the failure of Firefox to keep pace is really disappointing. Slow and lacking basic features for years almost makes Firefox feel li…

Adding multi-process support is the biggest single architectural change ever made to Firefox. It was started, then put on hold for a couple of years because it seemed insurmountable, and then started again. It's taken a huge amount of work, and thus a huge amount of time. But it's mostly done now and the benefits are reaching users.

And during the same time, they changed the JS engine to use a generational compacting garbage collector, which was also a bizarrely large amount of work for a more flexible future.

Re: Update on Multi-Process Firefox

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it supports multi-browser, cross-platform and has way more features than FF sync.

Firefox Sync is cross-platform (it runs everywhere Firefox does), and it has every feature I want. What additional features do you want that it doesn't have?

Integration outside of the browser is why I use keepass. I can press ctrl-alt-w and it will enter my passwords for things such as Steam, Skype, etc. in the applications themselves.

I use passwords outside Firefox. Ergo, a password manager tied to Firefox is inherently too limited.

Re: Update on Multi-Process Firefox

#97

Make Vimperator great again - still no support. :'( Two year old github issue but yet any development to be seen or reported :/

At this point I think it's either fix it yourself or look elsewhere :(. I don't think the current maintainers have the bandwidth to port it to WebExtensions.

Re: Update on Multi-Process Firefox

#98
post #65
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.

I'm missing just two. "cli-get" and "Live HTTP Headers". It's the former I really miss. The latter was occasionally useful for debugging stuff.

I read the description of cli-get, and it appears to be similar to a feature built-in to the network tab of the standard developer tools. If you right-click a request in the list of requests you can select "copy as cURL" from the popup menu to get the equivalent curl command line.

Re: Update on Multi-Process Firefox

#99
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can see on the Add-ons Manager page if a particular add-on is compatible. You can? Where? (Of course, it may be a version thing.)

You need an add-on for that: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-compat... That's not enough though. In about:addons all my add-ons are listed as compatible, but about:support still says that multiprocess is "disabled by add-ons". So YMMV. EDIT: The gotcha is that the current release uses a whitelist of only about 20 extensions. If you have anything else, you need to force-enable the feature, even i…

How would you force-enable that feature?

Re: Update on Multi-Process Firefox

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm stuck as half the addons I find useful aren't compatible. The two most notable are 1password and Self Destructing Cookies

Lastpass + Self Destructing Cookies for me :(

I upgraded to the latest version of the LastPass plugin direct from the LastPass site and it seems to work fine. For whatever reason, the one they have listed on AMO is a whole major version behind.

https://lastpass.com/lastpassffx/

Post reply on HN