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Multiprocess Firefox

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Re: Multiprocess Firefox

#71

Post by handsomeransoms »

josteink wrote: post #8

I'm very excited about this. I usually drive Firefox Beta without any sorts of complaints, but installed nightly just to try this out live. With my list of extensions[1] this doesn't seem to be particularly stable. It fails to bring up my tabs from last time. That would be OK for experimentation, had it not been for the fact that it also crashes regularly. These two combined really is test-stopper for me. Note: I'm n…

Firebug is known to not work (and cause stability problems) at the moment (for reasons mentioned by cpeterso). We're working with addon developers to improve this situation.

Re: Multiprocess Firefox

#72

Post by reubenmorais »

sanxiyn wrote: post #57
why-el wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? I don't get this. Mozilla is switching from a single-process model to a multi-one. Chrome was built that way from say one. I hope you see that moving from different models costs more time then actually pick one and support it forever.

You have a good point about switching cost. On the other hand, Chrome always could be run with --single-process (mainly there to measure the overhead of multiprocess), so it didn't really "pick one".

Once you have a multi-process setup in place, running in a single process is relatively simple, IPC just routes messages internally instead of across processes. Having a single-process setup and going to a multi-process one is a way, way, way larger effort.

Re: Multiprocess Firefox

#73

Post by reubenmorais »

mariusmg wrote: post #39

Not sure why we need this. Without plugins (flash, java, silverlight) , firefox IS pretty stabled.

This is more about responsiveness. It's not just about slow script, if you open a very large text file in a tab, the entire Firefox UI stalls. If you have some moderately heavy operation happening in a different tab, scrolling gets choppy across the board, switching tabs is janky, etc etc etc.

Re: Multiprocess Firefox

#74

Post by carnaval »

timothya wrote: post #52

> All IPC happens using the Chromium IPC libraries Interesting that they chose to share code with Chrome. Since the two are competitors, I would have thought that they'd use completely separate implementations. It's interesting that open source makes this sharing possible.

Yet (P)NaCl can go to hell. Brendan pls.

(I am aware that a fully sandboxed JIT is more complex to integrate than an IPC library)

Re: Multiprocess Firefox

#75

Post by Mindless2112 »

arsenerei wrote: post #68
timdiggerm wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone's already written a perfectly good solution that's readily available you either - pridefully write your own - use theirs

I'm curious, why does pride come into the equation?

If the existing implementation is perfectly good, writing your own is either pride, stupidity, or a learning exercise.

I would take for granted that the Firefox developers aren't stupid, and that they have enough interesting work to do that they aren't going to spend time on it as a learning exercise.

Re: Multiprocess Firefox

#76

Post by hansjorg »

josteink wrote: post #8

I'm very excited about this. I usually drive Firefox Beta without any sorts of complaints, but installed nightly just to try this out live. With my list of extensions[1] this doesn't seem to be particularly stable. It fails to bring up my tabs from last time. That would be OK for experimentation, had it not been for the fact that it also crashes regularly. These two combined really is test-stopper for me. Note: I'm n…

The Norwegian dictionary is very stable [1], so that shouldn't be the source of your problem.

1: http://språkrådet.no/Politikk-Fakta/Spraakpolitikk/

Re: Multiprocess Firefox

#77

Post by tedmielczarek »

carnaval wrote: post #74
timothya wrote: post #52

> All IPC happens using the Chromium IPC libraries Interesting that they chose to share code with Chrome. Since the two are competitors, I would have thought that they'd use completely separate implementations. It's interesting that open source makes this sharing possible.

Yet (P)NaCl can go to hell. Brendan pls. (I am aware that a fully sandboxed JIT is more complex to integrate than an IPC library)

The difference here is that we wanted to implement a multiprocess architecture. We don't want to implement (P)NaCl, since we don't think they're good for the web. We have no qualms with integrating code from other sources, we've done a lot of it. (Google Breakpad, WebRTC, numerous image and video decoding libraries, Freetype, libffi, ANGLE, the list goes on...)

Re: Multiprocess Firefox

#78

Post by tedmielczarek »

efuquen wrote: post #47

It's unfortunate how behind the curve Mozilla is on this. No denying this was a huge undertaking but the length of time it's taken has obviously been detrimental to Firefox usage, the only real reason I still use Chrome as my primary browser. Though I'll give Electrolysis a shot with Firefox Nightly and see how it works out.

The article explains this. We built the infrastructure, and we used it for out-of-process plugins on desktop, and for Firefox OS, but we went in search of lower-hanging fruit on desktop. There was also (IIRC) some worry about breaking extension compatibility, which would make it a nonstarter. I think there are some planned mitigations for that now, and we've fixed a lot of the easy wins for responsiveness, so we're pursuing this again.

Re: Multiprocess Firefox

#79

Post by diydsp »

danielfernandez wrote: post #65
diydsp wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hahaha, you and me and about 1% of the browser users (well on HN, probably more like 10%) have particular habits of keeping much larger numbers of tabs open than everyone else. Have you imagined an alternate scheme to tabs, where there are 100s of thousands of potential "tabs" which can be organized, called up in groups, moved in clumps together, and shared? Imagine each group of tabs like soldiers in a Command and C…

I have found out that lots of people from other non-technical areas also have the "too many tabs opened" problem. We are working on a solution for that except for the soldiers part =) The idea is that you can keep your browser synced (one or many browsers) and move tabs for later, search them, archive them, restore them and soon also share them. Take a look at http://listboard.it if you are interested.

oh, interesting, so I'm not the only one! I subscribed. Thank you.
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