A First Look At Firefox 5 | Hacker News Reader

A First Look At Firefox 5

conceivablytech.com

39 pointsGarbage20 comments

"the browser interface is planned to be more responsive"

So when does Mozilla get around to ripping Firefox wide open on an operating table and not letting the surgeons leave until each tab has it's own process?

Not switching back until I see a modern process architecture. Screw one tab being able to affect the responsiveness and stability of another or even worse... The browser's chrome. shudder

See, everyone breaks this out as an argument for responsiveness - but is Chrome really any better on this front? If I open half a dozen reddit tabs (or any other site that loads slowly) in Chrome, I cannot interact with (or often even SEE) any of those tabs until ALL of them have finished loading. This effect is normally limited to tabs all on the same domain but I have observed it on occasion cross-domain - tab A on domain A says it has finished loading, but I can't do anything until tab B, on domain B, has finished loading. The second tab B's loading icon stops spinning, tab A starts working. I would say this is a clear case of one tab affecting the responsiveness of another, so I don't think separate processes is a panacea for these issues.

That said, from a security perspective, they enable some clear benefits, so I am all for it - it's just not a cure-all for responsiveness issues.

I absolutely don't buy that argument, because everyone knows that processes are way more heavyweight and inter-process-communication is way more complex with processes than with threads. Using processes is a good way when you fear that some threads might crash (but the heck, why should they? how about writing software that is less prone to crashing) but not to make anything faster or more responsible. If you want that, then optimize the architecture, like, assign each tab its own JS thread, and suspend threads of tabs that are not visible. But I fail to see how processes are the magic recipe for repsonsibility. Just because Chrome does it, it does not mean that the responsiveness of Chrome is due to the fact that they use processes. They could just as well use threads and noone would even notice the difference (apart from tabs crashing the whole browser then).

Amen - also, it's completely possible to crash the whole of Chrome from a single tab. It certainly doesn't happen very often any more, but when Chrome was brand new it was hardly a rare occurrence. Separating tabs into processes doesn't magically make a browser fast, secure, or stable.

I agree. In fact, I gathered all the patches that have been floating around to do just that into a repo today: http://hg.mozilla.org/users/pwalton_mozilla.com/oop-tabs/

There is a lot (and by that I mean a lot - like, really basic stuff like focus) that doesn't work still, but the core of a multi-process Firefox is standing up already.

Firefox 4 already runs plugins in separate processes. Running each tab in its own process is codenamed "electrolysis" for reasons beyond my ken: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis

I'm guessing Electrolysis will get some more loving once the panic of shipping Firefox 4 has abated.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolysis is a chemical process that can be used to separate out elements -- picking that as a codename for splitting up tabs into processes seems reasonable.

Based on the current Roadmap, tabs as separate processes using electrolysis (e10s) is a goal for Firefox 7

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Roadmap

Not switching back until I see Linux on an equal priority to Windows (even XP !): https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox3/Firefox_Requirements#Platf... http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/01/16/0657240/Why-Linux-Lo...

P.S. Other browsers, supported by commercial entities, can be excused for doing this. Not Firefox.

I'm pretty sure more Firefox users run Windows than Linux, and hence it makes more sense to prioritize development for the more widely used platform.

Firefox has done some amazing work with 4.0 and the planned 5.0 release. It seems they were caught napping by Chrome for a while but now have gotten their act together.

I think chrome just got mozilla now... it's clearer and simpler than firefox.

I was a passionate user of firefox but this last chrome edition got me hooked.

Maybe a FF with a smaller top panel would get me back, but I doubt it.

A smaller top panel? Really?

I switched to Chrome because of 3 major things:

1) I can open and close it at least 3 times in the time that it takes Firefox to open. If a Firefox extension needs updates, then it's more like 12 times.

2) I had to occasionally open all of my bookmarks from a folder (15 or so). Doing this in Firefox would take something like 15 minutes, and most of the tabs would just fail. Chrome would do it nearly instantly, and act like it was no big deal.

3) The newer Firefoxes completely broke the shift-reload to clear the cache option. I still haven't found a decent way to force a complete fresh page load in Firefox 3.5+, which means it's a nearly useless for development. Chrome works great this way, and Firefox used to, but now Firefox creates a duplicate tab instead with the same shortcut? Wha? (I'm not actually sure which version of Firefox broke this)

Combine this with things like the fact that Chrome will let you have a regular session PLUS one or more Incognito sessions (extremely useful for developing websites with login or other state, or even just for keeping two different GMails open), or that the default tab behavior in Firefox has always been pretty weak, and Firefox just has a long way to go to win me back.

It makes me sad, because all things being equal, I'd rather support Mozilla than Google any day.

If these issues still happen in Firefox 4, I would be very happy to debug them if you can reproduce.

I'm all for clear and simple and I do get frustrated with Firefox's growing slowness, but....

Chrome just doesn't have enough features. It's too stripped out. I miss Firefox's better bookmark and history handling. I miss that I can open huge numbers of tabs and still see them, not just have a squished list of tabs with no information on them. I miss the better dev tool infrastructure. I hate the way Chrome periodically just blanks tabs and forces a reload.

Chrome to me feels like a better IE; OK, but basic. Not what I want from a browser.

Interesting. Could really take off. Seems like something Google would do (in terms of the website specific options) for Chrome.

Anyone taking bets on whether these features will have any compatibility with Microsoft's msSiteMode API in IE9?

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg131029.aspx

The Facebook picture in the article is taken from this page:

http://areweprettyyet.com/5/desktopApps/

...which links to bug 605222, "add support for .website shortcuts, msapplication meta information in Windows 7":

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=605222

...which links to the exact MSDN page you're talking about.

Why should Firefox have to comply with a Microsoft specific API?

I didn't say that they had to. But, having a single API is preferable to writing everything twice but in a slightly different way. Although, Microsoft aren't doing themselves any favours by not even trying a standardisation path.

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