The State Of Various Firefox Features

[cpearce]

I a developer working on Firefox's video playback code. WebM support in MSE is experimental, you should not expect it to work. You can get H.264/AAC to work with MSE if you have ffmpeg installed and flip the pref media.fragmented-mp4.ffmpeg.enabled in about:config. WebM support should be along in a few versions.

[droidhacker]

Multi-threaded firefox... wonderful... so now instead of the bloody thing going out of control on one core (leaving my other seven cores available for the purpose of killing firefox dead), now it is going to bring down the whole machine.

[GreatEmerald]

I a developer working on Firefox's video playback code. WebM support in MSE is experimental, you should not expect it to work. You can get H.264/AAC to work with MSE if you have ffmpeg installed and flip the pref media.fragmented-mp4.ffmpeg.enabled in about:config. WebM support should be along in a few versions.

Huh, that's strange, then why does it default to media.meadiasource.webm.enabled = true and media.meadiasource.mp4.enabled = false? Of course, it also defaults to media.mediasource.enabled = false so I guess it shouldn't matter much at this point. Thanks for the ffmpeg tip, I'll try it.

[Michael_S]

Multi-threaded firefox... wonderful... so now instead of the bloody thing going out of control on one core (leaving my other seven cores available for the purpose of killing firefox dead), now it is going to bring down the whole machine.

I commented earlier on this, but Firefox went from "as fast as Chrome" to "hangs for ten seconds at a time at least once a minute and hangs until I kill the process about twice a week" for me when I replaced my 2TB hard drive with a 500GB SSD. During the hangs, one of my CPU cores would be pegged at 100%. Once I turned off disk caching, performance went back to where it was before and I could switch between dozens of open tabs with quick responses, and opening new sites put my CPU at 70-90% on one core for just a few seconds and the page responsiveness is good. My processor is a five year old AMD chip, so it's not like I'm operating at the bleeding edge either.

The last major browser comparison by Tom's Hardware had Firefox narrowly take the title: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...t,3534-12.html

Has anyone else experienced the kinds of performance problems that droidhacker has?

(Edit) My point is, I think multiprocess will be an improvement and it's possible the pegged CPU on one core is some fluke you can fix.

[GreatEmerald]

Huh, that's strange, then why does it default to media.meadiasource.webm.enabled = true and media.meadiasource.mp4.enabled = false? Of course, it also defaults to media.mediasource.enabled = false so I guess it shouldn't matter much at this point. Thanks for the ffmpeg tip, I'll try it.

So I flipped the values above and enabled ffmpeg mp4 fragments, and YouTube still says just that MSE itself is enabled, not MSE with H.264.

[tancrackers]

I a developer working on Firefox's video playback code. WebM support in MSE is experimental, you should not expect it to work. You can get H.264/AAC to work with MSE if you have ffmpeg installed and flip the pref media.fragmented-mp4.ffmpeg.enabled in about:config. WebM support should be along in a few versions.

I had these set to true:
media.mediasource.enabled
media.mediasource.webm.enabled

Youtube kept asking to enable flash, but your method worked; thank you. It seems that webm isn't stable yet, but ffmpeg takes over nicely

[CrystalGamma]

Multi-threaded firefox... wonderful... so now instead of the bloody thing going out of control on one core (leaving my other seven cores available for the purpose of killing firefox dead), now it is going to bring down the whole machine.

Firefox has been multithreaded for years now, e10s is about process separation.

If one process maxing out the CPU makes your system unresponsive, I figure you have non-standard scheduler settings? Because it doesn't do that on my system.

[FuturePilot]

I like how all of these features are almost completely implemented in Windows but are barely working in Linux.

[Daktyl198]

I like how all of these features are almost completely implemented in Windows but are barely working in Linux.

To be fair, 85-90% of their 20% marketshare is on Windows so... it's pretty important to get new and important features working there first.
Also, let's not forget that Windows is a fairly complete and solid target for programmers, followed closely by OS X, leading to easier and/or quicker development. Linux... doesn't exactly try very hard to make things easy. Then we complain when nothing works. hah

[molecule-eye]

I tried skia and font rendering was MUCH WORSE. I had to revert back to cairo. I'm running the open source drivers for my Radeon 6870 (oibaf mesa from git).