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Comment by nxc18 | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have insight on why we're getting this for Firefox in (very late) 2016 while Chrome has had this since 2008 and IE since 2009?

Seriously, I understand the need for competition in the browser, and wish there was a viable alternative to chrome on things that aren't Windows, but the failure of Firefox to keep pace is really disappointing.

Slow and lacking basic features for years almost makes Firefox feel like the new IE, but at least we can be thankful that not many people are stuck with it.

To put this in perspective, Firefox has lagged on multi-process for 8 years. Everyone's beloved IE6 only had 5 years of ruining the internet before it was replaced.

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Firefox supported way more in the way of extensions and alterations then chrome, things like the zotero citation manager, grease monkey for user scripts, tree tyle tab for modifying the tab and bookmark menus, downthemall download manager, and importantly, TOR. Some of these could be ported to chrome, but they were easier to implement on firefox.

It's always been incredibly hackable, in the classic sense. That ability and the legacy of tools built on top of firefox was an important feature that they have largely maintained.

Chrome not only didn't have a legacy but still may break things for developers and sometimes just shrug off their complaints. It's a powerful browser, but it's focused on the needs of the parent company.

Adding multi-process support is the biggest single architectural change ever made to Firefox.

It was started, then put on hold for a couple of years because it seemed insurmountable, and then started again. It's taken a huge amount of work, and thus a huge amount of time. But it's mostly done now and the benefits are reaching users.

And during the same time, they changed the JS engine to use a generational compacting garbage collector, which was also a bizarrely large amount of work for a more flexible future.

Firefox has cooler extensions than Chrome. It took ages to create shims for all the troublesome internal APIs that popular extensions use, to make them keep working with multi-process.

Chrome was a greenfield product with no extension ecosystem to contend with.

Trying to overhaul the entire architecture of a browser with a huge extension ecosystem (and over a decade's worth of baggage associated with that) is hard.

I do recall IE6. It had many, many other issues besides "it's a resource hog". As for "lacks basic features," I do not recall anything that I would call "a basic feature" coming out in the browser landscape for the few recent years. A lot of new, cool stuff, yes; but nothing that would make me go "ooh, that's what I was missing all this time!"

(Disclaimer: user of Chromium,Chrome,FF,Midori,K-Meleon,various Operae,IE and "not-IE-whatever-it's-called",elinks and other stuff)

IE has had that for many decades.

One process per tab since forever. (Well, more like one process per window, because there weren't tabs at first).

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