back to article Firefox to give all extensions their own process in January

The Mozilla Foundation has outlined plans to add more multi-process features to its Firefox browser. Firefox has had limited multi-process capabilities since version 48, when they were added to enhance security and stability. This is basically a sandboxing play: Firefox's developers feel that if the core browser, each tab and …

  1. Magani
    Unhappy

    From memory...

    Is there any danger that they might also address the humongous memory usage associated with Firefox?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: From memory...

      Most of the huge memory usage comes from the demands of the web pages themselves and/or extensions being added to the browser. Opening up long sessions of media-heavy web pages in Chromium shows similar demands.

      So unless an HTML6 comes along demanding lean, mean web pages that can be downloaded completely over a dialup in less than a minute, with all content being required to fit a local domain hierarchy tree before it'll even be requested, don't expect this to change.

      1. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

        Re: From memory...

        My gripe isn't so much that FF will hog a lot of memory, but that it usually fails to give it back properly when it's no longer needed.

        1. Charles 9

          Re: From memory...

          "My gripe isn't so much that FF will hog a lot of memory, but that it usually fails to give it back properly when it's no longer needed."

          That's because of Undo points, in case you make a mistake. Recently Closed Tabs, the History, and all that.

        2. bombastic bob Silver badge
          Devil

          Re: From memory...

          "My gripe isn't so much that FF will hog a lot of memory, but that it usually fails to give it back properly when it's no longer needed."

          when I see background firefox CPU load at 100% of one of the cores [or higher] I usually do a 'killall firefox' - which so nicely saves its open tab/page state - then I reload it, putting the windows/tabs back the way I had it [on specific desktops, etc.] . yeah, I'm NOT running Windows, heh.

          I'm actually running a 2 year old Firefox, on FreeBSD, with gnome 2. Who needs "bleeding edge" ? Stable has its advantage, "not a moving target" being one of them. "New, shiny" is _HIGHLY_ overrated! [that goes DOUBLE when a 'hamburger' menu is added, or other "touchy-feely screen" so-called *ENHANCEMENTS* are added that decrease the amount of crap I can cram into a single desktop instance, or make the menu require more space than my ancient, yet fully functional, monitor can display]

          Yeah, "new, shiny" "up"grade is HIGHLY overrated. Unless it's ACTUALLY something worth UPgrading to.

          (how about security-patching the OLD versions instead? hmmm?????)

      2. bombastic bob Silver badge
        Devil

        Re: From memory...

        "So unless an HTML6 comes along demanding lean, mean web pages that can be downloaded completely over a dialup in less than a minute, with all content being required to fit a local domain hierarchy tree before it'll even be requested"

        THAT sounds like an EXCELLENT proposal! I vote we move that one forward, NOW.

        On a related note, I hope that putting NoScript into its own process won't negatively impact page load times - though I expect that NOT running the script would be a POSITIVE that could easily make up for it.

    2. tfewster

      Re: From memory...

      Is it that bad? On my PC, FF grabs about 300MB at startup and with currently about 60 tabs open is using 1GB

      IE uses 70MB per tab, so the equivalent usage would be about 4GB

      Chrome, with 60 blank tabs open is using 450MB; But each "real" usage seems to add 50-100MB so I'd guess would be similar to IE

      1. mythicalduck

        Re: From memory...

        Is it that bad? On my PC, FF grabs about 300MB at startup and with currently about 60 tabs open is using 1GB

        Well, I opened task manager when I saw your comment. And it was at 598M (7 tabs, 2 are shops, 1 is a paused YouTube video, and 4 are The Register). Whilst just looking at task manager (not even using Firefox), it has since breached 600M. Then it's just dropped to 594M and has just surpassed 603M

        Why so much is going on when all I'm doing is typing in a text box (or even not using Firefox) is a total mystery to me.

        At the end of this post, I'm now over 624M

        1. Dan 55 Silver badge

          Re: From memory...

          This from the start of the year says Firefox is the least hoggy, except on OS X where it's worse than Safari but better than Chrome.

    3. streaky

      Re: From memory...

      Unlikely, if anything I assume it'll get worse. Does anybody actually care though?

      Why so much is going on when all I'm doing is typing in a text box (or even not using Firefox) is a total mystery to me.

      Leaks plus GC one assumes. Gotta love JS.

    4. phuzz Silver badge

      Re: From memory...

      I give it a quick test every few months, including jsut the toher day, and on my Win10 x64 machine Firefox uses slightly less than Chrome, and both use quite a lot less than Edge and IE (Edge uses less, but neither are running an adblocker).

      As for giving memory back, usually Firefox will end up taking 1-2GB of RAM on my system after a few hours of opening and closing various different tabs. If I close it and reopen it goes back down. I assume Chrome is the same, I just can't be bothered to spend all morning finding out.

      1. AMBxx Silver badge
        Unhappy

        Re: From memory...

        My gripe is that ANY browser uses this much memory!

  2. Mark 85

    But will this make it run and display the pages any faster? Right now, Firefox is pretty unusable to me IE and Chrome at least load and display without hanging. As much as I used in the past, Memory and CPU % is out of sight. I would like to again but right now.. meh....

    1. kcblo

      I bet you have not tried Firefox lately. I recently have been using Firefox Nightly ver.53.0a1 and to my surprises, it renders web pages faster than raw Chrome browser ( with no addons), even though my Firefox Nightly is sometimes behaving a bit unstable, only an individual tab(s) crashed. The overall browser remained stable. I believe it will improve when approaching the formal release.

      1. Mark 85

        @kcblo

        You'd lose that bet. I've running Firefox's latest release 50.1.0 (and all the one's prior as they came out). I prefer it compared to Chrome but lately, not so much.

  3. swm

    The last two firefox releases run extremely slow over ssh. I suspect this is because of this multi-processing so if one process sends a lot of X11 data then the browser effectively hangs until this traffic is done. A spinning wait icon is enough to cause this problem. Going back to single-threading seems to fix this problem.

    The root problem is probably in the design of the X11 protocol.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      > extremely slow over ssh

      Try running x2go over ssh, and run firefox through that. It's by no means similar to local speeds, but quite acceptable even on ADSL connections both sides.

  4. AMBxx Silver badge
    Unhappy

    Please Mozilla

    Get it right this time. My wife recently switched to using Chrome and Edge (!). I'm not far from switching too.

    I miss the old Firefox that had clever new stuff.

    1. VinceH
      Pint

      Re: Please Mozilla

      Get it right this time. My wife recently switched to using Chrome and Edge (!)

      Wow. Just wow. I think you (and she) might need one of these -->

    2. bombastic bob Silver badge
      Devil

      Re: Please Mozilla

      "I miss the old Firefox that had clever new stuff."

      wouldn't it be AWESOME if they'd just PATCH the old versions for security vulnerabilities? I can't run auto-updates anyway - I'm using FreeBSD and it's BUILT FROM SOURCE. But a patch would be nice, not "latest and greatest new/shiny that I don't actually WANT".

  5. AlexV

    Misleading headline - extensions do not get their own process

    Multiprocess Firefox splits into two processes, one Chrome (User Interface) process and one Content (Web pages) process. Further down the line, there may be multiple content processes.

    Extensions run in the Chrome process, but can also provide additional code to be run in the Content process. They do not get their own separate process.

    Mozilla started by enabling Multiprocess automatically only for users without extensions. Then users with known-good extensions. The news now is that it's going to be automatically enabling it for users without known-bad extensions.

  6. PTW

    Ditched FF at v48

    I got sick of the memory and processor usage. It would often spin up the fan on my laptop when just browsing elReg!? And all the setting that require you to know about:config in detail - Why isn't WebRTC labelled as fecking WebRTC!!

    Switched to Pale Moon [which doesn't implement WebRTC] and although less than perfect, is keeping me happy which is no small task.

    But most of all I miss Opera of old :'( I even paid for it when you had the option. Thinking about it, Opera also had the best and most unintrusive advertising ever in the free version.

    1. druck Silver badge
      Unhappy

      Re: Ditched FF at v48

      I've also ditched Firefox on my systems. The performance of the last couple of versions has dropped off a cliff on my more modest and low memory systems which used to be ok, such as an old 2GB Atom netbook running Linux Mint and the 1GB Raspberry Pi 2's and 3's, but strangely also the company 4GB i5 laptop when using a VPN.

      The performance on my 4GB i3 and 8GB i7 laptops is acceptable, but what finished it off for me is Firefox's failure to play BBC News video clips, unless you refresh the page a few times until it stops being a black rectangle.

      Chromium's performance on all those systems is far superior, and BBC News clips play straight off, so its bye bye Firefox, which is a shame as I prefer it's fonts and rendering on many sites.

    2. Orv Silver badge

      Re: Ditched FF at v48

      " It would often spin up the fan on my laptop when just browsing elReg!?"

      To be fair ElReg has some really heavyweight video ads these days.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Memory Use

    Just get used to it.

    Gone are the days when devs spent time making sure that their application fitted into 640Kb or less.

    Or they did optimisation to ensure it ran as fast as possible. That's all gone by the board.

    Just taken a look on my Laptop

    Skype - open but not doing anything 164Mb

    Excel - one simple sheet open - 189Mb

    Word - one doc open 2500 words no grapihs etc -156Mb

    Firefox 960Mb - Three different instances which probably explains it. A total of 38 tabs.

    - Just closed one instance - 12 tabs memory down to 398Mb - One of those tabs was a Video which probably explians that. This is the ESR version 45.6

    Surprisingly

    iTunes 86.5Mb

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Memory Use

      Downvotes fro the devs there.

      I remember many years ago when MDK came out on the pc and was created with blazing speed and smooth graphics (for the time).

      The reason was,they deliberately used low spec machines and hard work to fine tune everything they could, instead of doing the norm of loading everything possible, dumping it all into the graphics card and hoping everyone would go out and upgrade to the latest whizzy machine.

      More of the story is here:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDK_(video_game)

    2. Dan 55 Silver badge

      Re: Memory Use

      Well I also blame the toolchain which churns out huge executables and the OS which is bloated.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Memory Use

      "Excel - one simple sheet open - 189Mb

      Word - one doc open 2500 words no grapihs etc -156Mb"

      And I bet you're not using a single feature that didn't already exist in Word and Excel 97, which happily ran in 16MB of RAM. I know I don't.

  8. Adrian 4

    Are you serious ?

    An application that hosts multiple unsynchronised data streams with a selection of external plugins and is a well-known target for malware .. and it was implemented in a single process ????

    What were they thinking ?

    Processes are cheap.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Are you serious ?

      Once upon a time, the average user owned a single-core PC that ran in the hundreds of MHz on an OS that was known to be rather flaky when it came to exotic process chains. That was around the time Mozilla was spawned from the remains of Netscape and eventually gave rise to Firebird (which had to become Firefox due to a trademark dispute IIRC).

  9. Anonymous C0ward

    Yay! Eat ALL the RAM!

    (letters)

  10. King Jack
    Unhappy

    I dream..

    I dream of the day where I can run the addons of my choosing and not have them disabled because I'm too stupid to be responsible for what runs on my machine. (Mozilla know best). I dream of the day when a 'Coolpreview' type of thing will be incorporated into the browser. Instead of more daft UI changes to make it look like something else. I dream of a day when usefulness to the user is a priority again.

    1. bombastic bob Silver badge
      Devil

      Re: I dream..

      you dream of a day when developers stop "feeling" and start THINKING again! You dream of a day when it's not necessary for junior dev #483 to get HIS way this time! A day when [FR]Agile development goes back to a top-down system with actual CODE REVIEW from a MANAGER (think Linus), instead of a "junior guy gets his way, too" daily SCRUM. Yotta yotta yotta.

      [I bet I _nailed_ it, too!]

      The code is being written by _INEXPERIENCED_ _MILLENIAL_ _CHILDREN_. Like Win-10-nic. Must. Go. Back. Path. Going. Over. Cliff. Must. Turn. Away. From. Edge. [pun intended]

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: I dream..

        That was the days before the Junior coders knew someone on the board and so on. Coders may have the knowledge but never forget they DON'T control the MONEY. And in this world, money talks, all else walks because they can just find someone else and they have investors to please; and without investors and their money, you basically have nothing.

        1. Dan 55 Silver badge

          Re: I dream..

          Code review? What's that.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: I dream..

        I don't think its a battle of experienced vs junior. Its good vs bad. That shit junior dev does not often mature to experienced good dev. Instead he grows into the worst of all beasts, the shit senior dev, who goes on to pollute hiring and crush the good junior devs who rapidly leave. Shit senior dev is a company and application development killer, with his incorrect assumptions, untested beliefs, and certainty that good code can never ever be written, because he could never do it.

        Making it junior vs senior is an authoritarians viewpoint, which sadly makes me think you might be a shit senior dev :-)

        1. Charles 9

          Re: I dream..

          The thing is, how does the junior dev survive to become the bad senior dev unless he knows someone high up (like someone on the board) who can protect him from the pruning process?

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