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The State Of Various Firefox Features

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  • The State Of Various Firefox Features

    Phoronix: The State Of Various Firefox Features

    Today's post by the new Phoronix intern is looking at the state of various new (and experimental) features within Mozilla's Firefox web-browser. Covered in this article is the Electrolysis e10s multi-process model, Encrypted Media Extensions, Media Source Extensions, Skia, off-main thread compositing, and sandboxing.

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    Relatedly to OMTC, there's also async pan and zoom, which substantially improves performance of scrolling, zooming, etc. It requires OMTC. For those who can get Nightly to work, this is one reason why it feels so much smoother.

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    • #3
      Thanks for the update on all of this! I think the web is heading towards a Chrome monoculture, or maybe a Chrome and Internet Explorer (and soon Edge) duopoly. In some benchmarks Firefox is keeping up with Chrome or slightly ahead, but I think to really stay competitive it needs the features you cover in the article to be production-ready and of course stable.

      One thing that made me bonkers with Firefox - I bought a 500GB SSD for my primary drive, and Firefox got slower. Much slower. After trying a dozen different things for a few weeks I finally hit upon going into about:config and disabling disk caching. Now Firefox runs more or less as fast as Chrome for me. But that was a frustrating development.

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      • #4
        And the in-progress port to GTK3 has substantial performance benefits.

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        • #5
          I love Firefox and have used it since forever, but lately I am getting disappointed.

          When I go to YouTube with Chome, I can playback the 4K videos and play back 1080p60.
          With Firefox, it doesn't list the 4K videos or the HFR 60 fps videos.

          Chrome is very useful for web developers because when a WebSockets, EventSource (SSE) or CORS or single-origin policy or anything goes wrong then it prints helpful messages to the developer console.

          Firefox is much more silent and less helpful.

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          • #6
            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.

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            • #7
              I noticed with e10s opening new tabs and loading pages is really slow.
              But I think it got a bit faster, it was worse before.

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              • #8
                Grate article.

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                • #9
                  Single thread processing and poor MSE support really affect my daily web browsing. I can see how people who don't care about free software switch over to chrome.

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                  • #10
                    No h264 lel

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