Firefox 48 Expected To Finally Enable Electrolysis By Default

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Firefox 48 Expected To Finally Enable Electrolysis By Default

With Firefox 47 having been released, attention is now turning to Firefox 48 with what's said to be the largest change ever shipped in Firefox...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Firefox-48-Electrolysis

[SyXbiT]

Sounds great. But I wonder if it's too late. Why on earth did it take so long?

[c117152]

Sounds great. But I wonder if it's too late. Why on earth did it take so long?

FirefoxOS, an embedded javascript pdf reader & half a dozen UI makeovers.

[starshipeleven]

FirefoxOS, an embedded javascript pdf reader & half a dozen UI makeovers.

ARGHHHHHH FirefoxOS. (cries)

[tga.d]

Sounds great. But I wonder if it's too late. Why on earth did it take so long?

As much as it may fly in the face of some people's preconceived notions, this has actually been one of Mozilla's top priorities. As one can see on https://wiki.mozilla.org/E10s
, support for e10s has been in Aurora for over a year now, and in nightly for much longer. One of the biggest reasons it's taken so long is that the team wanted to ensure that there were no statistical regressions in stability, and no regressions in performance (i.e., in A/B testing, things can't move to the next branch until there are fewer crashes on average than before, and nothing can be any slower). This was also posted in the article, but in case you missed it: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/Release_Criteria
Those are some pretty lofty goals. In addition, you can see the bugs they had to burn through here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Bug_Lists
That is a very large list of things that had to be dealt with. Point being, when a *massive* code base has been built from the beginning to be single-process, switching over to another model years later takes a ton of work.

[hansg]

Sounds great. But I wonder if it's too late. Why on earth did it take so long?

Because it is a non-trivial change, and because Firefox exposes, as I understand it, pretty much all of its internals to extensions. That problem had to be fixed before this problem could be tackled.

Of course, now I have a bunch of extensions that aren't being maintained anymore and that I'm just not sure will work with Firefox greater than 46. Is there any way to figure this out in advance, i.e. without actually installing newer Firefox versions? I don't want to upgrade and leave behind all the things that made me choose Firefox to begin with...

[Gusar]

Sounds great. But I wonder if it's too late. Why on earth did it take so long?

Extensions.

Implementing e10s while still allowing extensions the kind of control they had before was very tricky. And required adjustments in many extensions, not just in Firefox itself, which is another part of why it took so long - waiting for authors to make their extensions e10s-ready.

And before anyone brings up comparisons to Chrome... Chrome extensions don't have nearly as much control over the browser's behavior as Firefox extensions have.

[tga.d]

Extensions.

Implementing e10s while still allowing extensions the kind of control they had before was very tricky. And required adjustments in many extensions, not just in Firefox itself, which is another part of why it took so long - waiting for authors to make their extensions e10s-ready.

This is only half true. Yes, getting addons to work with e10s is tricky, but that has nothing to do with why it took so long. E10s is not, and will not be, enabled for Firefox profiles that have addons enabled for Firefox 48 and 49. You can see the progress on this front at https://www.arewee10syet.com/
But basically, Mozilla is approximately taking the position "We did what we could on our end, now it's your job to get the addons you wrote working." Of course if there's a specific bug in Firefox preventing your addon from working, they'll fix it, but assuming the behavior is going to be the same just isn't going to work. Right now there's no specific release where they enable e10s irrespective to your profile, but they're currently playing with the idea of enabling with whitelisted addons for Firefox 50, so at the absolute earliest it would be Firefox 51.

The other factor similar to this is accessibility, a.k.a. a11y. That is, similar to how addons can make incorrect assumptions about e10s, so can the code that Firefox uses for a11y purposes. It was looking like it might make it in, but iirc at the last meeting the a11y people decided to back off.

[LinAGKar]

Of course, now I have a bunch of extensions that aren't being maintained anymore and that I'm just not sure will work with Firefox greater than 46. Is there any way to figure this out in advance, i.e. without actually installing newer Firefox versions? I don't want to upgrade and leave behind all the things that made me choose Firefox to begin with...

They do have https://www.arewee10syet.com/ that covers some of it.

[Linuxhippy]

FirefoxOS, an embedded javascript pdf reader & half a dozen UI makeovers.

Couldn't agree more. I've reported about 10 bugs against pdf.js, yet after that much time and development ressources invested by mozilla it is still slower and less compatible than poppler - while the only added "value" it offers is beeing written in pure javascript.

However I am quite enthusiastic about Servo. While I don't agree that rendering the whole page at every graphical change is a good thing (higher memory bandwidth -> less energy efficiency on mobile devices) I am really happy mozilla invests in their technical fundament instead of pushing PR projects all the time.