Internet related News · 2017-06-14

A faster, more stable Mozilla Firefox is here. Meet ‘Electrolysis’ – News

So what are the 2 things absolutely necessary for a Website? Browser + download speed, right? A sluggish browser means poor download speeds. Between browsers, that’s where the competition is – stability & speed. For some time now, Mozilla’s Firefox browser seems to have taken a beating on both fronts, making it start experimenting with a format called, ‘Electrolysis’.

Electrolysis splits different computing tasks into different processes using separate memory compartments, an approach that isolates problems that otherwise can slow or even crash the entire browser.

To make Firefox run even complex sites faster, the development team has been changing it to run using multiple operating system processes. Meaning? The old Firefox used 1 process to run ALL the tabs in a browser. Modern browsers split the load into several independent processes. So Firefox decided to name the project to split Firefox into multiple processes, Electrolysis (or E10s) after the chemical process that divides water into its core elements. E10s, launched in 2016, was the largest change ever to Firefox code. Today, Mozilla launched the next big phase of the E10s initiative.

Here’s the post on the official blog:

With today’s release, Firefox uses up to four processes to run web page content across all open tabs. This means that a heavy, complex web page in one tab has a much lower impact on the responsiveness and speed in other tabs. By separating the tabs into separate processes, we make better use of the hardware on your computer, so Firefox can deliver you more of the web you love, with less waiting.
I’ve been living with this turned on by default in the pre-release version of Firefox (Nightly). The performance improvements are remarkable. Besides running faster and crashing less, E10S makes websites feel more smooth. Even busy pages, like Facebook newsfeeds, spool out smoothly and cleanly. After making the switch to Firefox with E10s, now I can’t live without it.
Firefox 54 with E10s makes sites run much better on all computers, especially on computers with less memory. Firefox aims to strike the “just right” balance between speed and memory usage. To learn more about Firefox’s multi-process architecture, and how it’s different from Chrome’s, check out Ryan Pollock’s post about the search for the Goldilocks browser.

Multi-Process Without Memory Bloat Firefox Wins Memory Usage Comparison

In our tests comparing memory usage for various browsers, we found that Firefox used significantly less RAM than other browsers on Windows 10, macOS, and Linux. (RAM stands for Random Access Memory, the type of memory that stores the apps you’re actively running.) This means that with Firefox you can browse freely, but still have enough memory left to run the other apps you want to use on your computer.

The Best Firefox Ever

This is the best release of Firefox ever, with improvements that will be very noticeable to even casual users of our beloved browser. Several other enhancements are shipping in Firefox today, and you can visit our release notes to see the full list. If you’re a web developer, or if you’ve built a browser extension, check out the Hacks Blog to read about all the new Web Platform and WebExtension APIs shipping today.

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