Firefox 48 beta brings 'largest change ever' thanks to 'Electrolysis'

[bill]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/06/08/firefox_electrolysis/ [theregister.co.uk]

Firefox 48 beta brings 'largest change ever' thanks to 'Electrolysis'

Electrolysis will see Mozilla “split Firefox into a UI process and a content process.” Long-time Firefox developer Asa Dotzler explains that “Splitting UI from content means that when a web page is devouring your computer’s processor, your tabs and buttons and menus won’t lock up too.”

Which sounds handy for those who keep plenty of Tabs open, or who run chunky web apps in an active tab and want their browser to sing.

[JAB Creations]

This has been a long-standing problem in Firefox. I can't wait for the Servo rendering engine to replace Gecko for true multi-threading support. This update is very welcome; we need Mozilla (and businesses in general) to actually fully commit to projects instead of half-finishing them and leaving them to decay.

John

[tangor]

When does the beta 48 roll out to the rank and file?

[bill]

If we can go by the Wikipedia schedule [en.wikipedia.org], we're looking at August 2, 2016 for the roll-out of FF 48.

[tangor]

Thanks. Oddly enough, I never thought to check wikipedia for that info! :)

[keyplyr]

Sadly, current Firefox mobile for Android is in desperate need of relief from web pages (and their ads) from devouring resources. Hopefully this innovation gets applied there as well.

[blend27]

@keyplyr

Sadly, current Firefox mobile for Android is in desperate need relief from web pages (and their ads) from devouring resources

try uBlock Origin, works on FF mobile.

Also, Hosts file level blocking of all the junk, try AdAway(you will need to root the device, not a biggie if one knows what they are doing, you will need a PC and about 15 minutes of your time, including research) - works wonders.

[keyplyr]

@blend27 - thanks but IMO the solution is not to add more weight to the browser, but to make it more efficient.

Also, no need to root; I have access to the root level, however I am not not a supporter of ad blocker thinking :)

[incrediBILL]

OK. I don't want to get into a discussion about poor programming techniques, but bloated old Firefox has succumbed to the worst of everything I could think any engineering team could screw up, they've done it. Chrome never really had this issue from the get-go because it was engineered right from the start. When you have old school engineers trapped in procedural methodology trying to cope with OOPS and multi-threaded multi-tasking you get bloated clunky Firefox. I don't care if you claim it was legacy code because some of us knew how to separate processes from the UI as far back as Win 3.0, it wasn't rocket science, you just have to be smart enough to design everything as their own processes that communicate with each other instead of waiting for the other process to complete.

I won't lie, it wasn't a mindset that I got all at once, but the fact that people have been building software as black-box ndividual processes for nearly 30 years means this wasn't new to them, or shouldn't have been, when Firefox was designed and built in the first place.

Number one pet peeve for firefox: PISS POOR MEMORY MANAGEMENT

If you leave Firefox with a bunch of tabs open doing absolutely nothing, no new activity, just sitting in a low memory tablet that's in SLEEP mode overnight, the next morning you'll turn it on to find out that somehow Firefox, probably with the help of Facebook, has gobbled up lots of memory and is now thrashing and swapping when you try to do anything. Might take a minute or two before it's usable again.

The real kicker is IT DOESN'T ALWAYS FREE UP MEMORY PROPERLY when you close the tabs!

I've asked them about this and Firefox blames the plugins and add-ons.

Really?

That's just an excuse for piss poor programming as there's no excuse for every chunk of memory associated with a tab, whether created as part of the HTML layout or variables in Javascript memory, not all being wiped out when that tab is closed. If they don't have the expertise on staff...

Sheesh.

[bill]

Are you saying that Chrome's memory management is significantly better than Firefox? Due to the number of tabs I keep open during the day I find both to be exceptionally greedy. The only thing Chrome has going for it is that I can find and kill the greediest tabs in Chrome via the task manager. Other than that I find myself regularly shutting down the browsers and restarting them is the only way I can recover some memory.