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Comment by teekert | Hacker News Reader

But this a poor, skewing argument always made by at least one person here. For most FF is very responsive and there are no problems what so ever.

And FF is not FF-OS.

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> For most FF is very responsive and there are no problems what so ever.

Open dev tools, type `for (;;) {}`. Notice the whole browser becomes unresponsive. This has been improved upon (as in it doesn't block the whole Firefox UI, just merely every single content tab) thanks to Electrolysis partially reaching stable but "there are no problems whatsoever" simply isn't true performance wise (and this is the most obvious one, there are numerous other very well known performance issues with FF)

Open your terminal, type ':(){ :|:& };:'. Notice how the whole OS becomes unresponsive.

There is a very simple solution to both these problems, which most people employ to great effect: just don't do that.

Besides that doing `perl -e 'for (;;) {}'` and watching your OS burn down in flames (which it doesn't) is the correct parallel, I'll assume you have overlooked that we have no control on what JS does in whatever page we're presented with, and if it's some heavy handed code it has a significant impact on whatever else I may be doing on an unrelated tab, which feels like going back to plain old cooperative multitasking, upon which the above perl code would effectively be a blight.

Run an infinite for loop and look at the performance degradation is about the dumbest test you could do. That's literally asking it to not stop executing. Yeah tab isolation would mean you only crash a tab but that isn't a good example.

So you tell me it's reasonable that a frozen tab makes the whole browser unresponsive. Nice.

I have an easy metric for that: when you're navigating, look at the "loading" spinner on the tab bar, and see how it almost always freezes every time a page is being drawn.

DOM painting/manipulation times in Gecko are a joke, probably the worst pain point of Firefox. And it's not the only one...

If you think FF is responsive, there are two options: 1) you haven't compared it to Chrome/WebKit/Edge, or 2) you don't run heavy applications such as TweetDeck on it.

And FF-OS was a complete OS that ran on Gecko, so yes, if Gecko (FF) is slow, the entire FF-OS is slow.

A direct Firefox to Firefox OS comparison is not reasonable. For one, FxOS was a greenfield ecosystem, so it was built with multiprocess from the start, whereas the e10s project moves relatively glacially toward a multiprocess world so that nothing gets broken.

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