Firefox preps processor revamp under Project Electrolysis Mozilla looks ready to revamp its Firefox web browser so tabs and user interfaces can run in separate processes. The feature has appeared in a nightly testing version of the browser and has been in lengthy development under Project Electrolysis. Developer Dan Mircea says the feature is activated by default in nightly builds …
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Or, as MS said about IE8 in 2009: "LCIE is a collection of internal architecture changes to Internet Explorer that improve the reliability, performance, and scalability of the browser. It also paves the way for future improvements in other areas, including security and usability."
IE6, of course, was designed on a different UI model. Each tab, displayed on the tab bar at the bottom of your screen, was a different process.
IE7, introduced in 2006, followed the more natural MS Windows model demonstrated by FF, and put the tabs at the top of the application window, where Bill Gates and Nature intended them to be. But they followed the FF example of putting all the tabs into one process. They fixed that in 2009, which was 6 years ago.
Already, under the current model, my most common Firefox support issue is when the the user has closed Firefox - it's no longer visible - but when you try to start it again you get "Firefox is already running". You have to open Task Mangler (or better yet, Process Exploder) and kill the invisible firefox.exe process before the user can get on with things.
Somehow I imagine this problem becoming even more common under the new regime.
Sounds like a probably worthy change. The next question is when they'll natively support a single "type what you want here" box instead of the current separate search and address boxes. Omnibar etc are OK, but they aren't exactly elegant and most non-techies never install an add-in.
> "If you want one box which does it all instead of two boxes, just remove the search box?"
Also, that's missing the point because (a) I already do have what I want - if I use Firefox (not often - mostly Chrome) then I have Omnibar installed anyway and (b) I was talking in the more general case of non-technical users, ie not Regsiter readers, who will never install an add-in and will never make any configuration changes.
No, I don't "want" anything. I'm reasonably happy to use Chrome or Safari.
I just think it's a loss to the wider world that Firefox seems happy to continue its slip into obscurity. The borg browser has become the borg browser, in part, because it provides a better user experience for the masses. And it's the masses who matter in this race, whether you want them to or not.
Don't you need a plugin or addon for that? I had to install six to enable
- clicking on buttons
- typing text
- having that text appear on the screen
- making that text go into the URL bar and not bing/google/yahoo
- making the browser accept what I typed without adding 'www' at the front
- making the browser accept what I typed without trying '.com' '.net' etc at the end
In addition to the initial three needed before it would even run in the first place. Once upon a time there were 'options' dialogues, now there just seems to be a tablet-setting-alike page which may or may not be here or quietly synced to google for our convenience...
And I did a more than slightly sarcastic LOL (with an extra F or two) at the 'seems to briefly freeze' remark... feels a bit like 'may be a reduction in the number of wings'.
As previously mentioned, it already is. I had to find out how to disable and put it back to a URL only bar.
I can understand why some people would like to search in the same place as they type, but when I'm trying to access servers, I don't particularly want it going "searching" for my server name
Thing is, though, Firefox market share continues to drop every month. It's things like this that cause it.
Firefox could just admit defeat and reorientate itself as a geek product, not suitable for non-techies, like Linux on the desktop. Or it could make some basic usability changes and perhaps start to recover.
AFAIK, every desktop browser is having its share of the market drop. This is probably due to more and more smartphones/tables being used to access the interwebs.
FF 31 ESR is my stable 'goto' browser that is installed on my desktop.
As I have lots of hit counter (plus ad serving and tracking) sites blocked I'm also contributing to the loss of market share.
I only use IE for my company intraweb sites that grumble (and even crash) when you use anything but IE8 (the new IE6?)
and just plain refuse to work with Chrome (desktop) but seem to manage ok when used from an android device.
"Firefox could just admit defeat and reorientate itself as a geek product, not suitable for non-techies, like Linux on the desktop. Or it could make some basic usability changes and perhaps start to recover."
In the address bar's default configuration it's defaulting to non-geek behaviour. It launches a DNS search and your search engine at the same time and if it gets back a DNS reply saying that address exists it asks you if you really wanted to go to that address instead of searching.
If you want geek stuff (disabling search engine from the address bar, etc...) then you have to change about:config, something which geeks are not too afraid of doing.
If anyone's wondering who to punch in the face for turning Mozilla/Firefox to shit, look no further
Will be switching back when this makes it in final release.
Chrome has annoyed me by removing NPAPI support by default, when 2 thirds of the internet still uses it. I get it's a deprecated thing, but tell that to the web devs and admins still running it, not the fucking end users trying to use the sites.
Yeah you can turn it back on, but why?
And they are removing it fully by August apparently.
"those times when the browser seems to briefly freeze when loading a big page, typing in a form, or scrolling"
I'm glad those are their biggest problems with this issue. Mine is all the tabs freezing for as fucking long as they feel like (often indefinitely) whenever a site's domain doesn't resolve immediately or a site doesn't answer or the eleventy-billionth third-party tracking / metric shitlet doesn't quite load or you know I just simply go to the wrong page (like, say, Scribd) which insta-freezes on load. Repeatedly. I'm positively thrilled it finally dawned on them that there might be a problem before mankind colonized Mars - if we're lucky, they might even release it as stable before we do. Maybe it'll even give me a good enough reason to move past version 27 and try fighting the POS they call UI these days.
> Chrome seems to grab one or two[fixed] 50MB process per tab.
"Seems" is the right term. There is a lot of shared working set across those processes (and others).
Here, one Chrome worker process has a working set of some 55MB, but of that almost 22MB is shared.
Just adding up the working set of processes will always end up double counting memory usage in Windows.
TL;DR: Memory in virtual memory systems is complicated. Almost every measure is not what you think it is.
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