The State Of Various Firefox Features

[Michael_S]

Mozilla is already beginning to experiment with moving some of the smallest parts of Servo into Firefox. Once Servo is able to replace large chunks of Gecko, we should notice huge performance increases. Also, it should make future development easier for them. Unfortunately, that could be a couple of years or so away. Once Servo is built up though, I imagine that it should begin to eat into Webkit/Blink usage by 3rd party projects.

While that's what we want to happen, the current C++ codebase for Firefox and Chrome have had an enormous amount of work put into optimizations and efficiency. I would love to be wrong, but I find it hard to believe that even an extremely well-done clean sheet redesign will be able to improve on performance any significant amount.

The real benefits, from what I understand, to Servo are in security, stability, and maintainability. If Servo can maintain the Gecko speed and memory usage or improve on them slightly and provide all of the good features of Firefox with less than one third as much code, that's a win.

[GreatEmerald]

Yea, nice article.
Unfortunately for me MSE enabled still freezes video playback. Oh well, hopefully it will get fixed in the next release or two.
Another thing that could be mentioned are improvements to Firefox Hello. Right now it only supports two-way chat, but conferencing is planned; I opened a bug to track the progress of that here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1165635

[CrystalGamma]

Yea, nice article.
Unfortunately for me MSE enabled still freezes video playback. Oh well, hopefully it will get fixed in the next release or two.
Another thing that could be mentioned are improvements to Firefox Hello. Right now it only supports two-way chat, but conferencing is planned; I opened a bug to track the progress of that here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1165635

Which version are you using, and what pages are having problems? I use Nightly and for months have not had serious problems with Youtube or any more excentric video sites (assuming they have HTML5 video support, seriously why are there still sites that require flash for video playback?).

On another note, I'm going to try out Skia now, there do exist some things that use more CPU than they ought to, and maybe tab switching will be instantanious despite e10s?

Update: Skia sure doesn't work on XWayland under GNOME-Wayland: the window is completely blank. The mouse cursor still changes in different parts of the window, so everything else seems fine. I had to find the preferences file in my profile just to revert the setting ...

[Pajn]

Firefox is much more silent and less helpful.

I would say the total opposite. Firefox tells you if you use old HTML fetures, modifies a prototype or uses input[type="password"] on a non https page.
Chrome does however provide much better tools for performance benchmarking and script debugging.
Firefox is still slightly better on CSS debugging but just slight as Chrome have added most features it missed from Firefox.

[89c51]

Since this is a linux site i was expecting the article to include GTK3 and Wayland.

[Daktyl198]

I find it odd that you failed to get Nightly working for extended periods of time with e10s disabled. With it enabled, there are certain sites (Like youtube) that crash it 100% of the time, but non-e10s Nightly is very stable (I get a crash maybe once every 5 months).

Anyway, onto the points of this article:
1. e10s is great and all, but please note that in the beginning stages, it is merely "split the content from the browser". If one tab crashes, they all will. Just the browser won't. This will be addressed later down the line.
2. Only Windows Vista and up is currently supported with Firefox EME. That's an Adobe issue, and has nothing to do with Mozilla. When Adobe makes builds of Primetime available for other platforms, Mozilla will advertise support. Also, you don't have to download a build without EME support; Merely go into your settings, and under the "content" tab, un-check "Play DRM content". This will stop it from downloading anything involving EME, and purge anything it's already downloaded from your system.
3. What you said about MSE choosing the lowest quality by default isn't true. If I set the player to the medium size (720p on my system), it will auto-change to that resolution. Then if I play another video in that session, the new video will ALSO start in the medium-size player with 720p resolution selected. Not to mention I fail to see how a bug related to keeping track of video time is related to video resolution (but I don't work on FF, so whatever).
4. All but a few devs at Mozilla have given up on Skia on Linux. They don't see enough Linux usage in comparison to really care. Skia has been in the exact shape it is now (better than Cairo, but buggy as hell) for about 2-3 years with little development on it as far as I can tell. It'd be nice if they finished it, but I'm not counting on it.
5. OMTC... this one is actually kinda "Linux"'s fault...
6. That wiki page is not sparse at all. It clearly states that the sandboxing is done based on code from Chromium's well-tested sandbox. And it says that the sandbox itself is complete on Windows and Linux, but disabled on Linux due to issues with such things as plugins.

All that being said, I'm just using Firefox until a Servo-based browser comes out. I can't use Chrome because I love to customize my interface in Firefox in a specific way and Chrome just... cant.

[Ericg]

Since this is a linux site i was expecting the article to include GTK3 and Wayland.

Wayland depends on GTK3, and I was putting off GTK3 for 2 reasons:

1) Fedora 22 comes out next week and it will, AFAIK, include a GTK3-build of Firefox, so it'll be tested then.
2) The GTK3 bug (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=627699) Hasnt been updated in basically a year.

[TumultuousUnicorn]

Since this is a linux site i was expecting the article to include GTK3 and Wayland.

There is an experimental version with GTK3, for instance here.
GTK3 can be run on Wayland, but Firefox in GTK3, I don't know.

But I hope Firefox will be ported on GTK3 & Wayland.

[frantisekz]

OMTC can be enabled in Aurora (starting with version 40) without setting env variables. Fast as hell in my case, but after few minutes the entire Gnome session freezed.

[GreatEmerald]

Which version are you using, and what pages are having problems? I use Nightly and for months have not had serious problems with Youtube or any more excentric video sites (assuming they have HTML5 video support, seriously why are there still sites that require flash for video playback?).

37.0.2, YouTube.