> Dietrich Ayala has a Firefox profile with 1,691 open tabs. With Firefox 54, starting up his instance of Firefox took 300 seconds and 2 GB of memory. Today, with Firefox 55, it takes just 15 seconds and 0.5 GB of memory. This improvement is primarily thanks to the tireless work of an external contributor, Kevin Jones, who virtually eliminated the fixed costs associated with restoring tabs.
This sounds more exciting to me than WebVR. Great work FF team.
I'm using 55 and am really impressed. Startup times have improved.
A nice UI feature is in Settings -> General -> Performance.
I still notice, compared to Chrome, that if I use 1 content process, no matter how many tabs I have open, or how many I have closed, the process just grows and grows over time. In contrast, Chrome may use more memory but its size dependably follows the number of tabs open / closed.
Even though FF is recommending 1 Content Process now as default on my low spec machine, I have set it to 2 to increase the likelihood that one of those processes has no tabs, and gets destroyed, along with whatever garbage accumulates.
I think Mozilla could do more research on migrating tabs to processes to minimize memory usage, and accumulated garbage from the runtime that doesn't seem to be collected. Perhaps after a certain threshold (time, size) content processes should be destroyed and tabs migrated to a new one.
I use e10s for about a year and I have processCount set to 4. It worked almost flawlessly and content process crashed maybe 1-2 times in this time.
I enabled "Recommended performance settings" and Firefox changed processCount to 1. I have dual-core (4-thread) CPU so I think they don't use number of cores as base for this setting but make some A/B testing on users.
Check in about:config 'e10s.rollout.cohort' and 'extensions.e10s' and you will see that every user is put in some kind of testing 'bucket'.
Great to see FF continue to progress. I moved back to FF from Chrome when I ditched a Win7 install for Ubuntu after building a new computer. It hasn't been without issue, but I'm enjoying FF and very happy to see it evolve.
If it continues through beta just fine, looks like media.block-autoplay-until-in-foreground will finally ship [0]. This is something I've been tracking through [1] since it was called out in the 54 release notes although it was not actually released. I was always a bit surprised that this wasn't the default behavior as it was in Chrome. Major use case for me: queuing up several YouTube videos from either search results or directly through the list of a users videos.
[2] "Firefox Fights Back: Inside Mozilla, CEO Chris Beard and his team are preparing to outmaneuver Google’s Chrome browser" is linked from the submitted article and looks like an interesting read. Only got a few comments on HN when it was submitted 5 days ago.
I'm very glad they've drastically reduced the resources taken up by restored (but not activated) tabs. I tend to hoard tabs which I swear I'll organise into bookmarks "soon" but never quite get round to it.
It's a problem... I just ended up accepting who I am and gave up on bookmarks. I have a single bookmarks bar for frequently-visited websites like email, webcomics, aggregators, blogs, etc.
It's populated with just favicons, no labels. And then, spread between 4 virtual machines, I have Firefox instances that each contain on average 20-200 tabs at a time.
It takes me weeks to whittle these down only to have them drastically inflate again. On the rare occasion a bug / data corruption leads to losing my tabs on one of my machines, it's more relieving than anything else.
I've been using it for the past 3 months as my primary browser. The mobile experience is superior to Chrome, in my opinion. (Particularly, the reader mode on mobile makes certain sites usable due to lack of JS, and proper font sizes.)
Facebook and Google have been pretty high-priority targets for improvement as part of the Quantum Flow project, so don't be surprised to see them get better in 56/57. As a Firefox nightly user, Google Docs/Sheets is night and day better than it used to be.
Linux (and macOS) should work on Firefox Nightly. For both, the Valve services are currently in beta and we can't really ship something that relies on beta drivers past our own beta releases.
If you encounter any bugs on Linux or macOS in Nightly, please do report them! The team is awesome about testing and fixing them. That said, the VR & driver/OS stack for support on those two platforms is still seeing a lot of flux and is not yet at the same level of performance and stability as Windows, depending on which particular version you grab.
Especially with WebVR, you can use Windows as a troublesome device driver. Running the browser under Windows, either on a separate machine, or if the stars align with your hardware, in a VM. I sometimes run a Vive off a Windows VM - setting up the VM to perform well was a bit fiddly, but it works. And Windows is a lot easier to manage when you can accumulate VM snapshots of it.
For WebVR-ish development, there's my https://github.com/mncharity/node-webvr-alt-stack . Insecure, with no a-frame or lens correction - it was MVP for me. But I use it comfortably on laptop integrated graphics, at 30 fps, in coffeehouses and conference rooms, so that's fun.
I have to wonder if the WebVR spec might be less bad, if it had drawn from a larger community. My favorite bit was WebVR 1.1's getFrameData() - it was spec'ed to take an immutable object, which it would then modify with new data. Sigh.
yeah, sure but how many linux lovers do suffer from that lack of love ? For example, I use FF on Linux every day and my kids too. I mainly browse news sites; the kids browse youtube and a few other video services. It's not like I need to play 3D games in the browser. So for me, FF level of love for linux is perfectly fine.
This wouldn't even be worth commenting on it's so normal, except that Mozilla has a strong history of getting all their stuff working on all platforms before letting a release drop, so as much as I love VR, Mozilla, and Linux, I'm going to sit here and pout until I can do my thing on my tower. <3
There's very little Linux love from firefox and mozilla. 10 years later and still no QT build[1], drops alsa because their implementation is broken and instead of fixing their own mess forces everybody to use pulseaudio[2] and quite a few in between.
It seems there's a reccuring "you do not represent a big enough portion of our users for us to care" attitude over time that made several not big enough portion of their users to stop caring and supporting firefox accelerating its demise caused by trying to be a chrome-like browser (among other mismanagement).
IntersectionObserver looks like a nice alternative to the janky event handlers that many sites employ for style changes on scroll. Now we just have to wait 10 years for it to be implemented in Safari.
Anecdote time: I've been a lifelong supporter on Firefox (and Mozilla at a higher level), both as an end consumer, and philosophically: This is how to build a company around human beings and respecting their rights and privacy. Even had a Firefox download link on my blog footer for over half a decade (back in the days of footer images)!
In the last few years, it was becoming harder and harder to support Firefox as a browser simply because the cons had started to outweigh the pros: It became slow, bulky, and hung multiple times, on a system with 16 Gig RAM nonetheless . Even though I was the only Firefox guy in my team (So many teams I know develop and test ONLY on chrome), I still stuck with it. But was beginning to feel that I was supporting FFx, more out of philosophy than out of it being good software (like RMS insisting on browsing the web by wget-ing pages).
I'm glad to note the last 2-3 releases for firefox have been EPIC! So many improvements for power users (I have 120+ tabs open right now and it's all buttery smooth), and focussing on what FIrefox does best: Be an awesome browser! Next time someone tells me how Chrome is hogging their system memory, I'll (once again) be proud to point them to the Firefox download page.
Good to see firefox progressing, I've started using it again ever since the multi process work in 54 and been relatively happy with it.
Only thing really missing for someone that always has about 50 tabs open is de-prioritising background tabs. I don't have music playing in the browser and just want it to use no more than 10% CPU on tabs I'm not actively browsing. There should be options to prioritize responsiveness over everything. Sick of cpu fans spinning up and browser taking time to respond to tab switches.
Has anyone got this working with the Oculus Rift DK2 on a Mac? When Mozilla first released their WebVR offering (I thought it was WebVR.com, now it seems to be gone) the WebVR build of Firefox supported it fine - but it doesn't appear to detect it now.
Oculus dropped Mac support a long time ago to focus on Windows so Firefox cannot interface with their hardware anymore. Besides, the DK2 is no longer officially supported by Oculus so it won't probably work on Windows either (I have not tried myself)
So firefox is again using the marketing and PR machine to pretend it is relevant and not heading towards its demise due to ignoring their users and not delivering.
It's crazy to see them continue to believe that firefox is great and continually improving and that losing users is due to something outside of their reach when they're piling up decisions accelerating firefox towards irrelevance.
We don't want WebVR on windows only, we want freedom of choice instead of being forced to submit to whatever mozilla unilaterally decide, we want the features that were provided by extensions that firefox decided to kill, we want an adblocker (content-blocker), we want an option to protect our privacy by killing trackers, we want a way for us users to reach developers and have our voice heard, and so on. we don't want more marketing and bs.
WebVR is on Windows only because the valve components it relies on are in Beta on OSX and Linux. They (correctly) won't ship someone else's beta as their "stable". So you'll have to use beta or nightly for it.
As for the other stuff... I've been using Firefox beta as my daily driver for a year and a half, because it's WAY FASTER than chrome, has better bookmarks handling, better built in tracker killing. The speed is only getting better as more parts of Quantum make it to beta. It sucks that it has to be so slow, but they are rebuilding an airplane while in the air with a few million passengers.
Seems like the rest of your post is just upset about the move to Webextensions. Massive API rewrites are awful. But they also bring big benefits. It is better for them to make this shift while Firefox still has some market share, so there is pressure on developers to rewrite.
All told, FF is pretty aggressively moving ahead of the pack in terms of speed and standards compliance. They already are ahead of the pack on privacy. It's not inappropriate to have marketing that pushes that excitement.
[+] [-] dmix|8 years ago|reply
This sounds more exciting to me than WebVR. Great work FF team.
[+] [-] rasz|8 years ago|reply
Opera 12.xx could hold ~200 open/rendered/active/fully responsive tabs at ~2-3GB ram.
[+] [-] clumsysmurf|8 years ago|reply
A nice UI feature is in Settings -> General -> Performance.
I still notice, compared to Chrome, that if I use 1 content process, no matter how many tabs I have open, or how many I have closed, the process just grows and grows over time. In contrast, Chrome may use more memory but its size dependably follows the number of tabs open / closed.
Even though FF is recommending 1 Content Process now as default on my low spec machine, I have set it to 2 to increase the likelihood that one of those processes has no tabs, and gets destroyed, along with whatever garbage accumulates.
I think Mozilla could do more research on migrating tabs to processes to minimize memory usage, and accumulated garbage from the runtime that doesn't seem to be collected. Perhaps after a certain threshold (time, size) content processes should be destroyed and tabs migrated to a new one.
[+] [-] karolg|8 years ago|reply
I enabled "Recommended performance settings" and Firefox changed processCount to 1. I have dual-core (4-thread) CPU so I think they don't use number of cores as base for this setting but make some A/B testing on users. Check in about:config 'e10s.rollout.cohort' and 'extensions.e10s' and you will see that every user is put in some kind of testing 'bucket'.
[+] [-] ronjouch|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JosephLark|8 years ago|reply
If it continues through beta just fine, looks like media.block-autoplay-until-in-foreground will finally ship [0]. This is something I've been tracking through [1] since it was called out in the 54 release notes although it was not actually released. I was always a bit surprised that this wasn't the default behavior as it was in Chrome. Major use case for me: queuing up several YouTube videos from either search results or directly through the list of a users videos.
[2] "Firefox Fights Back: Inside Mozilla, CEO Chris Beard and his team are preparing to outmaneuver Google’s Chrome browser" is linked from the submitted article and looks like an interesting read. Only got a few comments on HN when it was submitted 5 days ago.
[0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1387917
[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1308154
[2] https://www.cnet.com/special-reports/mozilla-firefox-fights-...
[+] [-] ChrisSD|8 years ago|reply
There's more info on this here: https://metafluff.com/2017/07/21/i-am-a-tab-hoarder/
[+] [-] kakarot|8 years ago|reply
It's populated with just favicons, no labels. And then, spread between 4 virtual machines, I have Firefox instances that each contain on average 20-200 tabs at a time.
It takes me weeks to whittle these down only to have them drastically inflate again. On the rare occasion a bug / data corruption leads to losing my tabs on one of my machines, it's more relieving than anything else.
[+] [-] batmansmk|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] christophilus|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rebelwebmaster|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] undoware|8 years ago|reply
Since I have no intention of switching to Windows after 20+ years on Linux, I'm going to have to wait, as usual.
[+] [-] larsberg|8 years ago|reply
If you encounter any bugs on Linux or macOS in Nightly, please do report them! The team is awesome about testing and fixing them. That said, the VR & driver/OS stack for support on those two platforms is still seeing a lot of flux and is not yet at the same level of performance and stability as Windows, depending on which particular version you grab.
[+] [-] fulafel|8 years ago|reply
It has been blocked on lack of accelrated compositing for years, ref https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1010527 (less than half the framerate of Chrome on WebGL demos).
It's blocked on this meta-bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=594876 which is in turn blocked by many bugs.
[+] [-] mncharity|8 years ago|reply
Especially with WebVR, you can use Windows as a troublesome device driver. Running the browser under Windows, either on a separate machine, or if the stars align with your hardware, in a VM. I sometimes run a Vive off a Windows VM - setting up the VM to perform well was a bit fiddly, but it works. And Windows is a lot easier to manage when you can accumulate VM snapshots of it.
For non-WebVR Vive or Rift use, there's http://idav.ucdavis.edu/~okreylos/ResDev/Vrui/ https://www.youtube.com/user/okreylos/videos .
For WebVR-ish development, there's my https://github.com/mncharity/node-webvr-alt-stack . Insecure, with no a-frame or lens correction - it was MVP for me. But I use it comfortably on laptop integrated graphics, at 30 fps, in coffeehouses and conference rooms, so that's fun.
I have to wonder if the WebVR spec might be less bad, if it had drawn from a larger community. My favorite bit was WebVR 1.1's getFrameData() - it was spec'ed to take an immutable object, which it would then modify with new data. Sigh.
[+] [-] wiz21c|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] undoware|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bigbugbag|8 years ago|reply
It seems there's a reccuring "you do not represent a big enough portion of our users for us to care" attitude over time that made several not big enough portion of their users to stop caring and supporting firefox accelerating its demise caused by trying to be a chrome-like browser (among other mismanagement).
[1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=451129 [2]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1345661
[+] [-] adamnemecek|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spartanatreyu|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cdevs|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] callahad|8 years ago|reply
Details in Jen's video at https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/07/tour-the-latest-features-o...
[+] [-] m_st|8 years ago|reply
It was marked as being incompatible with FF 55+ and e10s. See https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/self-destruct...
Does anyone know an alternative?
[+] [-] ronjouch|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _qbjt|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] givehimagun|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] madmax108|8 years ago|reply
In the last few years, it was becoming harder and harder to support Firefox as a browser simply because the cons had started to outweigh the pros: It became slow, bulky, and hung multiple times, on a system with 16 Gig RAM nonetheless . Even though I was the only Firefox guy in my team (So many teams I know develop and test ONLY on chrome), I still stuck with it. But was beginning to feel that I was supporting FFx, more out of philosophy than out of it being good software (like RMS insisting on browsing the web by wget-ing pages).
I'm glad to note the last 2-3 releases for firefox have been EPIC! So many improvements for power users (I have 120+ tabs open right now and it's all buttery smooth), and focussing on what FIrefox does best: Be an awesome browser! Next time someone tells me how Chrome is hogging their system memory, I'll (once again) be proud to point them to the Firefox download page.
Ffx dev team, You guys are awesome! :D
[+] [-] psandersen|8 years ago|reply
Only thing really missing for someone that always has about 50 tabs open is de-prioritising background tabs. I don't have music playing in the browser and just want it to use no more than 10% CPU on tabs I'm not actively browsing. There should be options to prioritize responsiveness over everything. Sick of cpu fans spinning up and browser taking time to respond to tab switches.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mrspeaker|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmarcos|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonathanlb|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] bigbugbag|8 years ago|reply
It's crazy to see them continue to believe that firefox is great and continually improving and that losing users is due to something outside of their reach when they're piling up decisions accelerating firefox towards irrelevance.
We don't want WebVR on windows only, we want freedom of choice instead of being forced to submit to whatever mozilla unilaterally decide, we want the features that were provided by extensions that firefox decided to kill, we want an adblocker (content-blocker), we want an option to protect our privacy by killing trackers, we want a way for us users to reach developers and have our voice heard, and so on. we don't want more marketing and bs.
[+] [-] ohthehugemanate|8 years ago|reply
As for the other stuff... I've been using Firefox beta as my daily driver for a year and a half, because it's WAY FASTER than chrome, has better bookmarks handling, better built in tracker killing. The speed is only getting better as more parts of Quantum make it to beta. It sucks that it has to be so slow, but they are rebuilding an airplane while in the air with a few million passengers.
Seems like the rest of your post is just upset about the move to Webextensions. Massive API rewrites are awful. But they also bring big benefits. It is better for them to make this shift while Firefox still has some market share, so there is pressure on developers to rewrite.
All told, FF is pretty aggressively moving ahead of the pack in terms of speed and standards compliance. They already are ahead of the pack on privacy. It's not inappropriate to have marketing that pushes that excitement.
[+] [-] veeti|8 years ago|reply
You mean like https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-protection-pbm?