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Comment by zapt02 | Hacker News Reader

Finally some movement on this! It really feels like an inferior experience in 2015 when your browser freezes from an unresponsive javascript in another tab.

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Currently, Firefox Nightly uses one process for the browser UI and a separate process for web content. However, one web content process is shared by all tabs. So slow JavaScript in one tab won't block the browser UI, but it will block web content in other tabs.

You can change this by increasing the "dom.ipc.processCount" preference in about:config, but there are still some known bugs with multiple content processes in desktop Firefox. There will be more work on multiple content processes in the future.

Chrome crashes and freezes all the time too.

Not for me, I have barely had any crashes or freezes with Chrom(ium).

Chromium circa 2008?

A browser being built from the ground up around one process per tab has an easier time implementing said feature than one with years of history? Who would've thought‽

The fact that they spent years arguing against its necessity rather than working on it certainly didn't help.

There is a lot of old cruft in its web engine "gecko" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecko_(software) , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XUL , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XPCOM). Many addons are XUL based and have had problems with the multi process mode. In 1-2 years hopefully Servo is ready combined with a simple HTML based UI to do what Firefox/Firebird/Phoenix did with Mozilla Suite: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Firefox#Naming

And yet if you read the comments in this thread there are still people arguing against its necessity.

Or IE7 circa 2006. IE7 separated its UI and browser content in different processes. IE8+ group several tabs into one process when passing a threshold. This is much better for battery life compare to Chrome process-per-tab.

Chrome also groups multiple tabs on single process, based on a number of factors: https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/process...

IE7 or IE8 introduced multi-process sandbox in Vista (not on XP). Afterwards, Google did the same with their first Chrome release.

In both IE 8-11 and Chrome 1+ there are several tabs per sub-process. Chrome comes even with its own "Taskmanager" where you can see which tab sits in which process and how many resources it takes. You can find the Taskmanager in the Chrome's "Tools" sub-menu.

Yes. Exactly like that. Firefox is damn near a full decade behind the curve.

Multiprocess isn't some magical panacea, its use is essentially to contain buggy code which shouldn't exist in the first place (this is true for its use as introducing extra security context for page content as well as its improvements to robustness against hangs). In both instances, a safer implementation language, or moving rendering and JS interpretation off the UI thread could be said to be far more elegant solutions. Mozilla is about a decade ahead of the curve here, with Rust and Servo providing both.

This. I am a SW tester and regularly use all the major browsers. I frankly do not see any lack in the current non-multiprocess FF in terms of the majority of browsing scenarios. If you really want the browser to be the operating system multi-processing is important, but for those not as interested in Google's agenda it isn't nearly as pertinent.

Really? I switched to FF from Chrome and it's my #1 gripe. I can't load a YouTube video without the entire browser freezing, it's ridiculous.

Are the freezing YouTube videos using Flash or HTML5 video? What OS are you on?

I'm on Linux. I have HTML5 videos enabled, so I think it's mostly that, but I can check later if you want.

(I'm a program manager on Mozilla's video team, so I'm definitely interested in your YouTube problems. :) YouTube playback is common user complaint, but it can be very configuration dependent.)

When you say the browser freezes, is it permanently deadlocked or does the video eventually start playing? Firefox 38 on Linux does not support MSE (Media Source Extensions), so YouTube's HTML5 video player can't use adaptive streaming. YouTube is blocked on Firefox's download and rate estimation of the video. It sounds like the YouTube player or Firefox might be stuck in a busy loop downloading the video.

To test whether the video download is causing the problem, you could try flipping the "media.mediasource.enabled" to about:config pref to true and "media.mediasource.whitelist" about:config pref to false (and restarting Firefox) to see if MSE helps. Alternately, MSE is enabled on Linux in Firefox Nightly (41) and Dev Edition (40) so you could just try them.

Does Flash play without freezing, if you have Flash installed? Flash on Linux supports H.264, but Firefox only supports VP8, VP9, and WebM unless you have gstreamer's H.264 decoder installed (but it has its own problems).

Nope, it starts playing after a bit. I'm afraid I won't be at my desktop, where this is more egregious, for about a week, but I'll investigate and reply again when I'm back. It does sound like the problem is what you describe, although I think I'm running Aurora on the desktop.

Thanks for your help. Feel free to contact me at cpeterson at mozilla dot com if you have more details or questions.

Buggy code shouldn't exist. Buggy code exists. When the buggy code in question isn't written by the browser then it's up to the browser to properly deal with that buggy code. Firefox doesn't. Other browsers do, but Firefox doesn't. Thus as a user I can either use Firefox and have a bad time or not use Firefox and have a good time. The choice is easy.

Maybe Mozilla is planning for the future better than all others. Perhaps in another 10 years Firefox won't be a shitty user experience. I will gladly switch if that becomes the case. I'm not holding my breath.

It's not that it's a full decade behind the curve, it's a decade behind where your perceived curve. There are advantages and disadvantages to both monolithic kernel and microkernel operating systems^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H browsers.

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