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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

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And they're still at it, too: https://areweslimyet.com/

Maybe I'm misreading things but it looks like it's been constantly getting worse since 2012?

There's more and more features every month. Add that to the various performance improvements (that can take a hit on the ram, dependending on how they're implemented), and it becomes a bit more understandable why you would see such an increase.

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

#72
post #19

“We can learn from the competition,” said Dotzler. “The way they implemented multi-process is RAM-intensive, it can get out of hand. We are learning from them and building an architecture that doesn’t eat all your RAM.” That's the money quote here. I've been waiting for this for a long time actually. Every browser I've tried except Firefox just basically eats all my RAM and other app performance (e.g. compiling stuff…

If you're on Mac, Safari is good in terms of both memory and cpu.

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

#73
post #61
post #19

“We can learn from the competition,” said Dotzler. “The way they implemented multi-process is RAM-intensive, it can get out of hand. We are learning from them and building an architecture that doesn’t eat all your RAM.” That's the money quote here. I've been waiting for this for a long time actually. Every browser I've tried except Firefox just basically eats all my RAM and other app performance (e.g. compiling stuff…

Nevertheless, I prefer Chrome's approach. I can just open the process explorer and kill a few of the most memory hungry tabs/tab groups; with Firefox, there's no other solution than killing the whole browser. Can't wait for this fix!

I believe in current Firefox you could kill the memory-hungry tabs, then go to about:memory and force a GC. Or restart and let your tabs stay open but not loaded until you use them. Not that either of these is super-convenient.

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

#74
post #19

“We can learn from the competition,” said Dotzler. “The way they implemented multi-process is RAM-intensive, it can get out of hand. We are learning from them and building an architecture that doesn’t eat all your RAM.” That's the money quote here. I've been waiting for this for a long time actually. Every browser I've tried except Firefox just basically eats all my RAM and other app performance (e.g. compiling stuff…

Webkit also learned from the experience of chrome with WebKit2 architecture, and uses less ram https://trac.webkit.org/wiki/WebKit2

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

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is super surprising to me, because irccloud is exactly what we use at Mozilla. Everyone seems happy with it's performance, and obviously most people are using FF.

As always it's probably a plugin. You could integrate the functionality of plugins which everybody uses, such as an adblocker (Instead of pocket? You are already doing it with the developer tools) -- but you get all your money from Google...

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

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And they're still at it, too: https://areweslimyet.com/

Maybe I'm misreading things but it looks like it's been constantly getting worse since 2012?

They're getting worse at a linear pace, while hardware improves exponentially. Effectively that's a pretty good improvement each year.

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

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JavaScript was little more than a toy scripting language used to animate stuff and change layouts when html/Css wouldn't fit for the greatest part of firefox's early existence. At the time it was probably the appropriate decision. Now, it's a huge burden on Firefox and it's good to finally see progress on this front.

Since Javascript is just a language that happens to execute client-side within the browser, why can we not use an existing language syntax (or an existing language entirely) for this purpose? For example, Go, Python, Rust, or perhaps Perl? It feels like a broken shell scripting language that really should have been replaced.

See e.g. https://www.scala-js.org/

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

#78

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.

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 state got lost when you switched back.

I've heard that some people set Firefox to not autorestore tabs on load, and then periodically close and reopen Firefox, so their background tabs aren't loaded. Pretty clumsy, but I guess it gets the job done. I don't know if there's any addons that do something similar.

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

#79
post #58
post #27

A pity it's now practically useless, since many add-ons need modification to keep electrolysis enabled. In a year or so things will be better I hope.

Only if addon authors fix them. Afaik mozilla devs aren't planning on adding additional compatibility shims.

Well, if add-ons are maintained, authors will fix them. Unmaintained add-ons is a bad deal anyway.

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

#80

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.

Even in an iOS fashion, in the way backgrounded apps work. I don't need tabs consuming memory in the background, and if I did I could white list it as able to run in the background.
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