Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by homulilly | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

homulilly

the poor state of e10s feels like neglect to me

View on HN

To save some Googling if you're like me and have no idea what e10s is:

Electrolysis: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2016/04/11/the-why-of-electr...

Seriously. These "enumeronyms" drive me batty.

I love this word, enumeronym, though. It seems you may have coined it, as the only Google search result is your comment. The second may well be this comment. I hope it catches on!

Google suggests that the correct term is "numeronym" [1].

> According to Tex Texin, the first numeronym of this kind was "S12n", the electronic mail account name given to Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) employee Jan Scherpenhuizen by a system administrator because his surname was too long to be an account name. By 1985, colleagues who found Jan's name unpronounceable often referred to him verbally as "S12n" (ess-twelve-en). The use of such numeronyms became part of DEC corporate culture.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numeronym

What's the problem with e10s?

I assume the problem is just that it seems to be moving towards completion at a snail's pace. It certainly feels like I have been hearing about it for a LONG time without a stable release.

Yeah, but it's a massive reworking of the FF internals, so it took a long time to complete. But I'm using it now, and it works pretty well.

My only hitch was needing to turn off some older add-ons. While Mozilla is still doing a slow roll-out, it disables E10s if it can't ensure your plugins will work. (One of mine was a HN add-on, amusingly.)

Most of the opoular add-ons are ready, though. To check, see: https://www.arewee10syet.com/

Of course, the reasons for it taking a while to get done are completely reasonable. :)

I would recommend the following add-on to know which add-ons are incompatible with e10s:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-compat...

It might be because it's running without you knowing about it? Preferences > Enable multi-process is checked for me.

I don't believe that I have that option at all here (Firefox 51.0 on Fedora 25).

This is kinda confusing, but that button only exists in Nightly and Developer builds. Here's how to check, enable, and force-enable it for regular builds: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Testing

Still doesn't work in a number of situations like if you have a touch screen.

(I just clicked the reply button to you using my touch screen on e10s. This is Fedora 25, on Wayland -- Firefox is using XWayland.)

I think this is a Win8 problem. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Schedule

You must be running Windows. I'm the Mozilla developer who is responsible for that. You'll get e10s on touchscreen in version 52.

Yeah that's correct. Awesome!

But e10s launched in Firefox 48 https://asadotzler.com/2016/06/06/firefox-48-beta-release-an... and hit 35% of all Firefox users by November. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Schedule

I did have to force enable it as a few plugins didn't official support it yet. So far it's been amazingly stable though and had sped up my browser considerably.

The e10s project actually stated back in 2009. The project was put on hold in 2011 because the architectural changes and add-on compatibility breakage was deemed insurmountable. In 2013, the project resumed and has been chugging away since.

You can see 2011-2013 pause in the revision history of Mozilla's Electrolysis wiki page:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/index.php?title=Electrolysis&offset...

I made a burndown chart of the e10s bugs in Bugzilla that shows the development progress. The bug high water mark was in 2016 and today at least 2,495 bugs (specifically tagged as e10s related) have been fixed:

https://people-mozilla.org/~cpeterson/burndown/burndown.html...

It's not process-per-tab like Chrome, it's just 2 or 3 processes.

By default. You can have a process per tab if you want.

> It's not process-per-tab like Chrome, it's just 2 or 3 processes.

Chrome is not process-per-tab - it's process per domain. (Even that's not true - sometimes tabs from multiple domains will still share the same process).

Firefox currently uses two processes (one for the UI, and one for rendering pages), but from a technical standpoint, that's the hard part, and that's what took so many years to develop. Once you have separated UI and rendering processes, going from 1 rendering process to multiple is relatively easy - you can already configure Nightly to do this, and Mozilla is basically just waiting for (a) e10s itself to rolled out more broadly, and (b) empirical evidence on what the right number of processes is, as (a) happens.

There are some downsides to doing true process-per-tab (the main one is that it's absurdly inefficient with memory), so ultimately Firefox will probably land on something in between (like Chrome and IE do).

What does IE do?

IE groups tabs into processes, so the number of processes scales sub-linearly with the number of open tabs, and hits a cap after a certain point: https://superuser.com/questions/586622/force-ie-to-use-one-p...

Multiple content processes (two plus the browser UI process) are now enabled in Firefox Nightly (54).

What's wrong with e10s?

A better question would be: what is e10s?

Multi-process Firefox. One process for browser chrome and one or more for content. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Overview

I know what it is, so why would that be a better question for me? If you want to ask what e10s is for your own information, that's fine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com