Firefox 48 Beta, Release, and E10S

Notably, it&#x27;ll remain disabled by default if you&#x27;re using extensions (pretty much everybody here who is running Firefox?): <i>The groups that will have to wait a bit for E10S account for about half of our release users and include Windows XP users, users with screen readers, RTL users, and the largest group, extension users.</i><p>You can manually enable it, though[0]: <i>However, if you want to permanently opt-in, you can do so with a simple pref change. Just go to about:config and toggle browser.tabs.remote.autostart to true. On your next restart, e10s should be active. To verify that it is active, go to about:support and look for a number higher than 0 in &quot;Multiprocess Windows&quot;.</i><p>I didn&#x27;t realize they had this kind of fine-grained control over A&#x2F;B-testing in their Firefox beta population, as Asa puts it: <i>We have all the knobs.</i> I understand where they are coming from, but it feels a bit weird to have a piece of software running on my computer checking in with a remote server to enable&#x2F;disable functionality.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.mozilla.org&#x2F;Electrolysis" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.mozilla.org&#x2F;Electrolysis</a>

Is E10S going to replace the current model? I mean - is the plan to drop the choice when E10S is stable&#x2F;works for all known scenarios?<p>I&#x27;m asking because I might have a bit of a problem with my tab addiction (my phone regularly reaches 60+, my laptop or desktop probable sit around 2-3 times that for weeks at a time) and I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;ll translate well into a process-per-tab model.<p>Yes, I know about bookmarks, read-later tools and that this isn&#x27;t the healthiest habit.

There are interesting data and comparisons without E10S on <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.mozilla.org&#x2F;Electrolysis&#x2F;Release_Criteria" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.mozilla.org&#x2F;Electrolysis&#x2F;Release_Criteria</a> and <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.erahm.org&#x2F;2016&#x2F;02&#x2F;11&#x2F;memory-usage-of-firefox-with-e10s-enabled&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.erahm.org&#x2F;2016&#x2F;02&#x2F;11&#x2F;memory-usage-of-firefox-with...</a>

People blame chrome for being memory hog and it&#x27;s probably exactly for this reason. I fully expect mem usage to go up for E10S release as well... As a daily FF user both at work and at home, I&#x27;m not sure if that&#x27;s a good thing.

The main issue I find with E10s (nightly user here), is on some heavy sites which requires firefox to load on a specific tab, will often get the dreaded &quot;swirl arrow reload&quot; animation on other open tabs until the site is loaded.

My biggest issue with FF is Firebug - it just can&#x27;t compete with Chrome dev tools. On the other hand, FF has one huge advantage - Pentadactyl.

This is not important, but how did they arrive at &quot;E10S&quot; when they went about shortening &quot;electrolysis&quot;? Anybody know?

Could someone running e10s load up newegg.com and see if it freezes the browser for about 30 seconds? Separating processes is supposed to mean that chrome stays responsive, but that hasn&#x27;t been my experience with it.

I&#x27;m trying Firefox about once a year because I want to like it for being independent and privacy minded. But every time I find myself going back to other browsers for seemingly minor reasons.<p>The most important one is that firefox opens new windows a few hundered milliseconds too slowly (on Mac OS X). Just a little bit too slowly for me to just hit Cmd+N and blindly start typing a url. I have to stop and pay attention to when the window is ready, hundereds of times a day.<p>Another annoyance, a much less important one, is that Firefox wastes a lot of screen real estate at the top.

Wonder what happens when the ui process crashes with the backend process still running? Or vice versa? It seems like killing Firefox just became a whole lot more difficult.

Since a couple of years I can&#x27;t use firefox anymore with the usual must have privacy extensions. It&#x27;s super slow and laggy compared to chrome ;( I wish I would use firefox but I can&#x27;t see it freeze completely everytime I click on a link.

Will it be enabled on Linux too?

I am still patiently waiting until unloaded tabs have a memory footprint of 0KB instead of 0.7MB.

This is great. I&#x27;ve been using Firefox since Phoenix and it only continues getting better!

Sounds like even though it&#x27;s been delayed for years, Electrolysis is still not anywhere close to being ready for prime time. And it&#x27;s not even a full process sandbox. How many more years are we going to wait for that?

That sounds awesome!!! 7-years-late awesome, but still great news!

Congrats!

&gt;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.<p>Finally. Every browser I use does this when I load a huge reddit thread while RES in enabled.

Tried it, still not as responsive as chrome

&gt; 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.<p>Well, for that particular problem, there is a much simpler solution than splitting application into two distinct processes. It&#x27;s called multithreading. Moving UI into a separate thread would not only be simpler than moving it into a separate process, but also wouldn&#x27;t result in 20-50% memory usage growth.