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Comment by _ea1k | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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/

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...

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

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...

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

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

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

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!

(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

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

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.

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