Mozilla's Servo Still Striving For WebGL Support

[franglais125]

Do you guys have e10s enabled?
I must say that since e10s, FF is by far the most performant browser when handling many tabs[...]

You can even take it a step further and enable multi-process e10s. I have set the number of WebContent processes to 4 (will be default for Firefox 54 or 55). I have been using this for a number of weeks on Firefox 53 with great success.

Most probably, for Firefox 54 it will be enabled only for a fraction of the e10s population. More info from the last e10s meeting: https://wiki.mozilla.org/E10s/Status/May16

To enable more e10s processes, set "dom.ipc.processCount" to 4 in about:config.

[Michael_S]

I am hopeful that as pieces of Gecko are replaced by Servo, Firefox will get faster.

It's the main browser I use on my home computers, but that's only because it's open source. I have to use Chrome and Firefox for work, and while Chrome is more memory hungry, I have more spare RAM than spare CPU capacity so Firefox is often noticeably slower. (Edit: I realize I could use Chromium, but even though that's also open source I am wary of a world wide WebKit/Blink monoculture. No one corporation, foundation, or community should rule the browser world. Even if you believe Google is a mostly benevolent corporation - which I do not - I still think it's a bad idea.)

You can even take it a step further and enable multi-process e10s. I have set the number of WebContent processes to 4 (will be default for Firefox 54 or 55). I have been using this for a number of weeks on Firefox 53 with great success.

Most probably, for Firefox 54 it will be enabled only for a fraction of the e10s population. More info from the last e10s meeting: https://wiki.mozilla.org/E10s/Status/May16

To enable more e10s processes, set "dom.ipc.processCount" to 4 in about:config.

Thanks for the suggestion! I'm going to try it.

[polarathene]

I don't understand the complaint very much. I have 16GB of RAM which was under $100 even back when I built this machine (it's an Intel Haswell w/ DDR3) and I don't have RAM usage issues with pretty much any browser, even if some of them do use more RAM than they used to.

That said if a browser is going to use a lot of RAM, I would expect it to use it effectively such that more RAM usage enables lower CPU usage (by caching more stuff or something). High CPU AND high RAM is highly annoying.

I've had a system with 16GB RAM and about 200 or so tabs would often max the RAM easily. Chrome would steadily grow ram usage over time even if you use a small amount of tabs and don't exit chrome, from memory 1GB RAM usage over a week or so would become quite a bit more even if you're not adding more tabs. Meanwhile FF would have performance issues but it's RAM usage always was remaining steady...

I'm not an average browser user though I guess, I digest alot of content when learning something new and either keeping tabs I've read open for reference or for eventual(hopeful) note taking at a later point depending on time.

[log0]

Never understood the whining about firefox performance. I am running it with adblocker on most of the time and use the bookmarks-sidebar instead of leaving dozens of tabs open. It runs just fine even on my crappy amd cpu.

[NomadDemon]

i use max 10 tabs, because its impossible to use more [not performence, but usability]

[johnp117]

Another trick to speed up Firefox is to run Nightly and enable features such as WebRender or disable animations with toolkit.cosmeticAnimations.enabled=false (will be in FF55). There's also JSGC_DISABLE_POISONING=1 and javascript.options.asyncstack=false, which disable debugging features that create better crash reports in Nightly, but that, if enabled, reduce performance.

But even without those experimental features or performance tuning options used, the Quantum projects (especially Quantum Flow) have delivered tremendous improvements over the past couple of weeks.
There's a (usually) weekly newsletter by ehsan in which he mentions all the work that has happened since the last issue that is often quite informative.


Back 2 topic: Stylo (the Servo's CSS Style System or "Quantum CSS") should be included in Nightly builds shortly (although not enabled by default) and can then be used by brave individuals (or rather: individuals that don't care if a website doesn't look 100% perfect, but can accept that in return for a faster browsing experience)

[Stebs]

My issues with YouTube on Firefox were caused by the site preferring to stream VP9 instead of H.264, which has hardware acceleration. Using this extension fixed the high CPU usage I was seeing.

We are talking about Firefox on Linux, right?
Then what you see makes no sense. On Linux, Firefox always does software decoding for all codecs, hardware decoders of GPUs are not used (afaik this is STILL the same for all other Browsers on Linux).
While h264ify can make a big difference on Windows (when your GPU can accelerate h264 but not VP9 - which is the case for Ivy Bridge), on Linux it should make no big difference.

No, just the integrated graphics of an old Ivy Bridge i3.

On my Ivy Bridge i5-3317U (a rather slow Netbook 2 Cores but 4 HT CPU), VP9 is even a tiny bit faster than h264 on an 1080p60 Youtube Video I just tried: ~ 32% vs 37% (Video not fullscreen). Load is distributed very evenly on all (virtual) 4 cores.
Btw, with VP9 you need less bandwidth for the same video than with h264, so normally on Linux, VP9 is "better" than h264 (still talking about video in browsers).
So something is definitely strange/broken on your PC.
Maybe just try it with a new 2. clean Firefox Profile... (I mean create a second profile, just for testing purposes)

[Guest]

have you tried it yet? some of my addons are not officially compatible but i've not encountered any issues with force-enabled e10s - worth giving it a try imho

Not applicable with pentadactyl, pentadactyl uses powerful but deprecated API features that are slowly getting removed from new firefox versions and developers were struggling to keep up. You can virtually hide entire firefox GUI and the addon implements it's own UI which resembles drop-down terminal.
I'm still running pretty old ESR firefox version just to not have to deal with breakages as often, but sooner or later pentadactyl in it's current form is likely gonna die.


Anyways, don't really care about FF performance too much, it's good enough as it is currently on my system.
Don't care about memory consumption either since I have roughly twice more system ram than I actually use and it was a conscious decision for me since I tuned my kernel to retain a big chunks of ram as filesystem cache for a long time (I have an SSD, but cached stuff in RAM is still way faster than SSD).

[GrayShade]

There's a (usually) weekly newsletter by ehsan in which he mentions all the work that has happened since the last issue that is often quite informative.

Thanks, I wasn't aware of this.