"YouTube will now play in HTML5 if Flash is not present."
Strange, I thought Firefox had been doing this for years. I don't have Flash installed on my machine and YouTube always played HTML5 video?
Firefox 48 entered beta this week, complete with a feature called “Electrolysis” that Mozilla bills as “the largest change we’ve ever made to Firefox.” Electrolysis will see Mozilla “split Firefox into a UI process and a content process.” Long-time Firefox developer Asa Dotzler explains that “Splitting UI from content means …
> And that should make us feel good?
Hmm, quite. Sounds like a kill-switch to me.
Despite all the negativity around FF over the last few years, Chromification and tweaking for tweaking's sake. This is actually a very cool feature so I look forward to them getting it dialled.
>Electrolysis will see Mozilla “split Firefox into a UI process and a content process.” Long-time Firefox >developer Asa Dotzler explains that “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.”
Maybe sb should inform them, that you don't need to spawn processes to emulate threads anymore nowadays. Not even on Linux.
It's also because the whole point of this is that they want to copy Chrome's security model.
Chrome has a process for each tab, and that process runs with very restricted permissions (called a "sandbox"). Those processes are managed by the main process, which also draws the browser's UI. This means that if you exploit a security hole in Chrome, you end up running code inside the per-tab process, in the sandbox. You then need a second security hole to get out of the sandbox. This makes it much harder to exploit Chrome.
By their nature, threads all run at the same security level, so you can't do that with threads.
Firefox started with a single process, and they're slowly splitting it up. Separating into 2 processes, one for all the tabs and one for the UI, is the first step. In future releases they'll split up the tabs into separate processes, then restrict the permissions.
"In future releases they'll split up the tabs into separate processes, "
Oh God, I hope not. Chrome gobbles up way too much memory as you approach a useful (ie, large) number of windows and tabs... it's not good for much except a quick check if you need to look at a single site where the scripts are too tangled to whitelist.
Firefox became very serious about multithreadedness with Firefox 4. Ever since v4 HTML parsing, UI, bookmarks, history etc. etc. happens on separate threads.
I get a sense that the benefits of multiprocess are a bit too technical for a general audience so they explain it using responsiveness as that is easier to understand.
I have a similar extension on FF called Suspend Tab. It's currently disabled, though, as suspending a tab while I had any data typed into an edit field would clear it, and I'm prone to leaving half-edited comments open while I go chasing some other thing that has caught my attention for the moment.
Firefox x64 is kinda janky, but I've not had freezes like people are talking about here. I had a lot of issues with the Windows x86 version, but switching to the 64-bit Firefox alternatives (Waterfox, Pale Moon, Cyberfox, etc.) fixed it. When FF official came in a 64-bit beta, I tried that, and found that the early beta was far more stable than the release x86 had been in a long time for me. I don't know what they were waiting for to release it; whatever they were trying to fix was not an issue for me.
FF has had its issues, and the direction Moz seems to want to go (to copy Chrome in every way) is frustrating, to say the least (if I wanted Chrome, I'd be using it), but e10s is not one of the changes that has me wondering what they were thinking. It's worked pretty well for me so far, though I have had some addon issues (and since Moz does not make the addons, it's up to their respective devs to keep them updated. I know keeping up with a moving target is hard, but this change is worth it). Even with the addon issues, the smooth responsiveness is something I appreciate greatly.
This is actually a good move. It means Adobe Flash will stop being white-listed.
This is great news. Firefox can lock up completely when a page won't load. It's a real pain though the crash recognition helps restoring untimely ended previous session.
I stopped using Chrome last year when it was discovered WebRTC leaked sensitive network information. Now with sandboxed tabs in FF I have no reason to look back. Although, this may well mean 100% CPU usage for tabs running Flash content.
P.S. Cute name. FF can get quite hairy.
How nice of them to realize that is how FF should have worked from day minus one. Writing programs that freeze up the UI (for any reason whatsoever) refusing to act on your clicks only to unexpectedly lurch back to life and apply your past clicks to whatever they now substituted under them (like FF operates) should be punishable by a compulsory feathering and tarring, at the very minimum.
Day minus one would have been in 2002, when everyone was still running single core CPUs. It would be four more years before IE would get tabs, and another two years after that before the first version of Chrome was released. It seems that expecting FF to have those kinds of features at that point is a bit off-base.
Well, firefoxes (red pandas) are supposed to be hairy. They're funny looking bald.
Of course, you probably knew this, but the electrolysis they're likely talking about here is the use of electricity to separate elements within a given substance, like how water can be separated into oxygen and hydrogen, and Firefox can be separated into UI and rendering processes.
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So I'm not alone in suffering freezes, good to know others suffer too. It's why I'm moving to Vivaldi (once they get bookmarks functionality). Until then it's Chrome. Though, I'm browsing this in FF, I thought I'd give ver. 47 the benefit of the doubt, and I do want to love FF, but they make it difficult.
https://www.arewee10syet.com/
Yeah, have a look at all broken addons, the ones not tested but listed, and then notice that this page only lists 880 addons out of 1000s.
Also look at the number of users that are using the broken addons who will either lose functionality or be stuck unable to benefit from the E10 changes.
Will any of those users be told when their addons are disabled as incompatible? Not if the move to signed addons is any example of how Mozilla treat their user base.
I've had a quick check:
* I've got 5/20 addons which are known to work
* I've got 6/20 addons which are known not to work
* I've got 3/20 addons which haven't been tested
* I've got 6/20 addons which aren't even listed
Out of the 6 plugins which are broken, I use 5 of them every day and will be disabling E10 until they all work; Ghostery, Downthemall, Lastpass, Session Manager and X-notifier.
A bunch that haven't been tested or aren't listed I'd be in the same boat if they broke, like tab groups, The Addon Bar (restored), external IP and Last tab close button.
Mozilla can't force the addon devs to update their addons. E10s has been in development for years; it's certainly not a surprise to anyone that it is coming. Perhaps this release will motivate addon devs to get things updated.
My addons don't all work perfectly with e10s yet either; for the moment I have it off too.
I'd be interested to see how well it copes with the likes of firebug (pretty much the main reason I use firebug, never got on with chromes Dev tools, never bothered much with operas and IE/edge only became useful from ie11 onwards).
As I have been known take the whole machine down by badly written javascript causing a total lockup when trying to debug.
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