Tuesday, June 20th 2017
Firefox 54 Released: Multi-process, Optimized Memory Footprint
The Mozilla Foundation has recently launched the latest version of their Firefox web browser. The foxiest web browser around, which lets you access all of those amazing websites (like TPU) now features increased support for multitasking through its multi-process technology. A result of the Electrolysis effort from Mozilla's part, which has spawned more than eight years of work, Firefox 54 applies the Goldilocks principle to browser design, straddling an approach between increased performance and acceptable memory usage.
As such, Firefox won't be like Chrome, where each process is responsible for a single tab and its content handling (and can therefore increase memory usage immensely, which has justified Chrome's fame as a memory hog), but will instead opt for a more streamlined approach. Open 10 different tabs with 10 sites in Chrome, and you'll have 10 different processes. Each of those processes has its own memory - with their own instance of the browser's engine. Au contraire, Firefox now creates up to 4 separate processes for web page content. This means that the first 4 tabs each use those 4 processes, and additional tabs run using threads within those processes, optimizing, as per Firefox, memory usage and performance.
This also means that up to a point (well, up to 4 tabs), Firefox will now be more stable should one of the tabs (and processes) fail, since they are virtually separated from the other tabs. However, should you have more than 4 tabs open, a failing tab could result in a cascading event for the other tabs open under that same process. Firefox is adding the option for users to increase the number of processes Firefox can start on the browser settings though, so if you have more than 8 GB of system RAM (the amount that Firefox is looking towards optimizing with this change), you can increase them at the expense of increased memory consumption.
Source:
Medium
As such, Firefox won't be like Chrome, where each process is responsible for a single tab and its content handling (and can therefore increase memory usage immensely, which has justified Chrome's fame as a memory hog), but will instead opt for a more streamlined approach. Open 10 different tabs with 10 sites in Chrome, and you'll have 10 different processes. Each of those processes has its own memory - with their own instance of the browser's engine. Au contraire, Firefox now creates up to 4 separate processes for web page content. This means that the first 4 tabs each use those 4 processes, and additional tabs run using threads within those processes, optimizing, as per Firefox, memory usage and performance.
28 Comments on Firefox 54 Released: Multi-process, Optimized Memory Footprint
@Raevenlord
you foking wot m8?
Opera that I'm using now has its share of dumb stuff as well, but at least not as severe as in Firefox.
and 50+ on the desktop.
EDIT: just found this about FF64, with a few limitations it says. Ok FF64 is almost an exact duplicate of Waterfox even uses the same exact addons paths
so slimjet is not open source? made in america? not available outside windows? claims to block ALL ads even though an ad can be a simple image tag? a proper ad blocker needs to be user customizable to add newly needed blocks... further, slim doesnt make any effort for anyone to trust them with their generic site compared to vivaldi (people from classic opera) or brave (known security people)
re·tard·ed/rəˈtärdəd/
adjective
less advanced in mental, physical, or social development than is usual for one's age.
So you judge a peice of software on the hipster huge fad factor of the website?
You can find them to this day on the mozilla FTP site.
You can find their entire 64-bit development process documented here:
wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Win64
@kn00tcn
Yes, I've tried all the settings that allegedly ignore the block list and it does jack shit. Youtube was still totally unplayable because it was running on CPU instead of GPU. But in Opera and Chrome, all I have to do is flip ONE setting and everything changes. I've requiested countless times for Mozilla to unblock AMD E-450 because it works flawlessly without ANY crashes or problems and they just ignore me. Filled a Bugzilla report for non-functional GPU blocklist ignoring controls and it has been like 2 months and no one bothered to respond. So I said fuck you and went to competition. Chrome was shit so I ditched it because you need 30 extensions just to make the damn browser half functional. Opera needs like 4 extensions because it has the rest already integrated (adblock, mouse gestures, bookmarks access sidebar etc). I know it's Chinese owned, but it's still coded by Norwegians. Besides, we already fucked our privacy years ago when we started using webmails like GMail and services like Google Search, so who really cares at this point. I just wanted a browser that serves me. And browser that intentionally blocks GPU acceleration for no damn good reason doesn't serve me. So it had to go. This multi-process thing sounds interesting, but it's essentially useless for me because of the GPU thing. And I need same browser on all my systems to have bookmarks and stuff in sync.
You can download whatever version you can www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all/
Waterfox is Firefox's spin-off which has nothing to do with Mozilla.
Downloading the 64-bit build isn't hard.
www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/
All you have to do is click where the red arrow is.