Firefox Still Working Towards Multi-Process Support

[Daktyl198]

So I just tried this out (on a new profile):
Main Process used ~93MB of explicit memory, while the second process used ~88.4MB
Linux Mint 64-bit, shitty specs.

this is with two sites loaded in different tabs, one being the Phoronix forums. I would also like to report that what I call "interface lag" (the opening of new tabs, menus, etc occasionally visibly lagging while a page is rendering and/or javascript is executing) was effectively gone. Completely. Then again, I only tried with a few tabs so it could just be I had a lucky go.

I'll be sure to test it out more later.

P.P.S: Michael, Firefox also recently enabled subtitle support for HTML5 video by default in Nightly. That's a better thing to report on than a still ongoing project that I'm sure you've covered before.

[zxy_thf]

This is JOKE OF THE DAY.



Now, GOOGLE and NSA, all are watching what you are doing, what you have in your PC, in all the PCs in your home.

Never reply his posts. All he can do is trolling

[molecule-eye]

I can't remember the last time firefox crashed on me. I CAN remember the last time I was happy that firefox wasn't gobbling up all my memory (on my ultrabook with NON-upgradable RAM). Do we really need multi-process support? I know that I don't!

[mrugiero]

Using it right now. It broke my panorama setup. I can't objectively say it's bad, as it was supposed to be buggy, but I wouldn't have expected to have the most annoying bug I could ever hit, which is messing with my finely crafted panorama. Oh, well.

[Sdar]

I thought they just give up with the electrolysis project in 2012...

Anyway i can't see any problems related to going multi-thread, it could increase performance stability and security...

It's still not ready for daily use but sounds like a great news for the mozilla desktop browser to me.

[mrugiero]

I can't remember the last time firefox crashed on me. I CAN remember the last time I was happy that firefox wasn't gobbling up all my memory (on my ultrabook with NON-upgradable RAM). Do we really need multi-process support? I know that I don't!

I personally can see the benefit on having only two processes, for sandboxing support (I wouldn't probably see any benefit, as I don't have really sensible data, though), and it shouldn't make it take much more memory than it does right now. However, performance wise, I think threads tend to be better than processes. Of course, the mentioned features of them (being simpler to work with because when they fail, they fail consistently) means less debugging time, which at the same time means faster development. Like everything, is a trade-off.

[mrugiero]

I thought they just give up with the electrolysis project in 2012...

Anyway i can't see any problems related to going multi-thread, it could increase performance stability and security...

It's still not ready for daily use but sounds like a great news for the mozilla desktop browser to me.

The problem is that we are not talking about multi-thread, as Firefox is already multi-threaded, we are talking about multi-process.

[MWisBest]

Honestly I don't like multi-process. I thought the main benefit for multi-process was to stop a plugin crash from crashing the whole browser, but Firefox has already accomplished this for years with their plugin-container process. While of course you can maybe get better multi-threading, I think there's no reason you can't just get code optimized for multi-threading without requiring multi-process.

UPDATE: After reading the blog post linked in the article, I'm slightly more on-board with this, but it'll take some testing it out first-hand to convince me really.

[Sdar]

Using it right now. It broke my panorama setup. I can't objectively say it's bad, as it was supposed to be buggy, but I wouldn't have expected to have the most annoying bug I could ever hit, which is messing with my finely crafted panorama. Oh, well.

Well they advice to create a new profile for something:

We're developing off of mozilla-central. Therefore, it's possible to enable Electrolysis right now in Firefox nightlies.

Update to a current nightly.
We strongly recommend you create a new profile!
Set the browser.tabs.remote preference to true.
Restart Firefox.

What works:

Back and forward buttons
URL bar and search bar
Context menu (somewhat)
Middle clicking to open links
Bookmarks
Flash (sometimes)
Add-on installation on a.m.o (without download progress)
The find bar

What doesn't work yet:

Session restore
Developer tools
Many addons
Many plugins
Click to play
Zooming

Until they fixed session restore your panorama will likely be deleted.

The problem is that we are not talking about multi-thread, as Firefox is already multi-threaded, we are talking about multi-process.

The interface didn't feel too threaded right now in ff stable

[e8hffff]

I'll have to check to see what happens when you have two Firefox windows open or if another window is of their private nature. You'd think they'd be separate processes not hanging off the same application. Obviously Gecko must be multi process.