In the next few days, Firefox 48 Beta becomes available. If all goes well in our beta testing, we’re about 6 weeks away from shipping the first phase of E10S to Firefox release users with the launch of Firefox 48 on August 2nd.
E10S is short for “Electrolysis“. Similar to how chemists can use the technique called electrolysis to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, we’re using project Electrolysis to split Firefox into a UI process and a content process. Splitting UI from content means that when a web page is devouring your computer’s processor, your tabs and buttons and menus won’t lock up too.
Beta versions of Electrolysis exist in earlier versions. If you’re using Firefox 47, you can enable it by going to about:config and setting browser.tabs.remote.autostart to true. You can check status by going to about:summary.
Most extensions disable it, though, and there are a number of other conditions that will disable it in 47 and later, too.
Wait, which extensions disable it? I’ve been running a number of extensions (ad block, ghostery, proper buttons, newtab on the left) and not had that happen.
I’ve never e10s be disabled. I’ve also yet to see real incompatibility, even with content-modifying extensions like Turn Out The Lights. While I don’t doubt that it can happen, It’s not like every extensions, or even most extensions have issues. At least not that I’ve seen.
Maybe not most, but extensions that both modify page content and provide a UI will disable it, if there isn’t a working shim (Which exist for the most popular extensions) will disable it.
Those will eventually have to be re-written, though, into two parts communicating via IPC, because the shims won’t exist forever.
In my case, on FF47 (Not the 48 beta yet), I have Classic Theme Restorer, uBlock Origin, FireGestures, Tab Groups, Flash Video Downloader, and RightBar, and e10s is disabled. I haven’t yet tracked down which addons cause it to be disabled, though.
EDIT: In my case, all extensions apparently disable it.
Edited 2016-06-08 22:58 UTC
I’m very happy this is finally going into the mainstream Firefox. I’ve been running Nightly for months now with only very minor issues – almost all of which are related to add-ons not having been adapted to work with the multi-process operation of the browser.
In addition, I ended up disabling multi-process about a month ago due to an issue caused by seemingly unrelated source code changes that resulted in abhorrent performance – something which would likely not have gotten through – or persisted for weeks – if multi-process was mainstreamed. Glad to see that is resolved as well 😉
Can you run non-signed extensions in FF 48?
How is this supposed to affect the general resources consumption by Firefox: increase, decrease or insignificantly?
On a modern pc, increase insignificantly
On a modern PC, using the modern web, Firefox can be taxing on resources.
Only in the same way that Chrome/IE/Edge/Safari can be taxing on those resources…by opening a whole bunch of tabs while having a limited amount of memory and insufficient bandwidth/threads. Or by opening a site that is extremely heavy (theverge, windowscentral and boredpanda on my 4 year pc sometimes cause minor hickups)
If you are benchmarking these browsers you might see differences but a modern PC has 8 GB of memory, multiple CPU-cores, a GPU that can be used for acceleration and at least a small caching SSD. There really isn’t much that can bring such a machine to its knees except for massive diskwrites or CPU-stress and those aren’t actions that browsers cause.
I’m not interested in benchmarking against other browsers, my interest is in Firefox becoming leaner not fatter.
PS: there are a lot of PCs sold right now that don’t meet your criteria for “modern”.
If you benchmark this change it will surely say that Firefox got fatter. But it is only a little bit of fat that will protect you against a world of pain (if done well, so probably not in the first release).
And yes, a lot of NEW pc’s are not MODERN pc’s. People buy bad machines, there isn’t much that can be done about that. Those bad machines are still quite decent but they are surely not as pleasurable to use as a modern pc like I described and people that buy them shouldn’t expect the same performance (or even the same stability, because as this exact topic proofs there is a trade-off between stability and performance)
Browsing the web is a basic task, one that people do even on their phones. There is no solid reason a contemporary average PC, which has a lot more power compared with a phone, should not do it flawlessly.
Are we back to the 3-year PC upgrade cycle, but this time not for games but for just browsing the web?
Most pc’s, even the new bad ones, can browse the web without any problem and do that much better than phones. Phones conserver resources by putting inactive tabs into (deep) sleep mode and have to recover them entirely when they are woken up. Pc’s, even bad ones, behave much faster for this.
But MODERN pc’s do it even better faster and without stuttering. The time when pc’s had trouble with rendering the web is really behind us. However, having 100’s of open tabs that you switch between while giving flawless behavior on limited memory is going to give trouble
Although browsing is a basic task, it is also one of the most unreliable given that browsers try to interpret what was meant by the HTML/CSS instead of executing exact instructions. Rendering HTML+CSS as was intended is extremely tough for a programmer and computer, that is why it is so resource intensive. And no browser does that flawlessly, just go to html5test.com and see for yourself
I do quite a bit of browsing using Firefox on a 15″ MacBook Pro (quad core i7, 16Gb RAM, SSD). It isn’t the latest model, but it still meets that definition of “modern”.
Certain sites manage to get the MacBook’s fans running full blast and the spinning pinwheel isn’t exactly an unusual sight in Firefox. Every now and then it can become unresponsive, preventing me from changing between tabs/windows.
Of course the web has changed massively since I first went online at home in the late 90s, but when it comes to things like the number of open tabs, I don’t browse more heavily on my “modern” MacBook than I did on my Pentium II back in the day.
That would absolutely qualify as a modern pc and I would be very interested to know which sites can have that effect. Do those sites also have that effect in Chrome/Safari? Could plugins play a part in this behavior?
I don’t know when you had your Pentium II, but I am quite sure that was in the IE5/Netscape timeframe where we didn’t use tabs at all, where webmasters had learned that a site should load most of the content in 8 seconds and we relied on progressive jpegs and gifs to improve their quality after those first 8 seconds. Those browsers also crashed a lot
I was running Opera at the time – I actually still have a paid for CD copy of 3.62 around somewhere.
Opera featured tabs in version 4 (June 2000) and an MDI interface before that. In some ways its tab/multi-page handling back then was more sophisticated than Chrome and Firefox in 2016 (at least before installing various extensions).
It was also a pretty stable browser, (excluding certain buggy versions) generally no worse than Firefox today. Browsing with 50 tabs open was no problem on my Pentium II, although I had upgraded it to a massive 256Mb RAM.
My first Opera in a floppy, 1.0.x? The Britannic Magazine used to include 2 of them. The other test-ware.
The Guardian does indeed seem to be a horribly massive site. I see > 400 MB in just 2 tabs. I also tested in Chrome, IE and Edge (all without plugins) and they are all roughly equivalent in that horrible amount of memory. CPU also seems bad at that site but still not more than a few percent even with video running. All browsers also seemed to be slow at switching and opening/closing tabs. On mobile it seemed a little bit better but scrolling and switching tabs was also a horrible experience. Clearly that site is doing something wrong. I haven’t tested with any plugins/blockers to find out what is causing these issues. Definitely a horrible site that I will visit when I try to stress a machine
(Also: 256 MB in a PII? WOW!
and Opera was well ahead of the curve with tabs but I had so many crashes and rendering issues with it that I couldn’t use it until much more recent years)
Edited 2016-06-10 09:45 UTC
I don’t think that Firefox is any worse than the other browsers at this.
I sometimes need to browse using Firefox on Fedora 23 from my small home server box. It’s a E-350 system, which is a 1.6 GHz AMD Bobcat CPU.
Firefox runs just fine. It helps if you use NoScript, which I do, and disable Flash, which I also do.
I think most of the slowness of many modern web sites is in their terrible Javascript.
On my Linux laptop (3 GHz i7) or my desktop (4GHz i7) Chrome and Firefox are equally fast. They’re instant.
I’ve used e10s on a number of systems now, and the my experience has been that it uses a similar (though larger) amount of memory. The real win is on weaker computers, where this vastly increases the responsiveness of the UI.
On an already fast machine, there will be very little, if any performance change. However, a crashed page will not crash Firefox with e10s (this happens fairly rarely, but it’s nice to have).