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Comment by xg15 | Hacker News Reader

> It’s faster, lags less, hogs much less memory than chrome, and in June we’ll release multi-process Firefox, putting us at performance parity with Chrome in most of the ways we mere humans can actually perceive.

I'm rooting for them but I really hope they get this done quickly. On Firefox, I often have ~.5 second UI freezes throughout the use which lead to an impression of sluggishness. Chrome, with the same number of tabs and equivalent extensions doesn't have this. By all means, Mozilla, use tricks if needed - keep stuff loaded in the background, defer script execution, prefetch DNS etc - but perceived responsiveness is really important. Freezing UI of all things is the worst that could happen.

Despite this, I'll stay on Firefox and look forward for the future.

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> I really hope they get this done quickly

You don't have to wait for them to enable it for everyone. Enable it yourself by setting browser.tabs.remote.autostart to true in about:config (on ff48-53 this'll use one one process for ui and one for all tabs, I believe on 54+ it'll use more). (As long as you don't have any addons that don't support it, anyway -- after enabling it, check in about:support under "Multiprocess Windows", and if not, about:addons should show the offending addon. IIRC there's a staged rollout, so it may already be enabled for you even if you don't force it on, unless you have an addon that doesn't support it)

browser.tabs.remote.autostart should already be default-enabled, unless your extensions aren't compatible with it. It'll tell you "disabled by add-ons" in about:support, if that's the case.

And you can enable multiple content processes prior to Firefox 54 by setting dom.ipc.processCount to a number higher than 1. This is the maximum number of content processes that it'll use, as you open more tabs. So, if your number of tabs exceeds that value, it'll currently still distribute them among your content processes round-robin-style.

You get the best performance vs. RAM ratio with this value at 4 (or I believe rather just the number of cores your CPU has). This is also what Firefox 54 will ship with. You get the best security and best performance, disregarding RAM, by setting it to something really high, like 500, so that a new process starts up with each tab that you open (which allows each tab to be sandboxed individually).

I didn't know about about:support, nice. It indeed says "disabled by addons". Other than a binary search, how do I figure out which one(s)?

The addons ( about:addons ) page will tell you on a per addon basis.

I don't see it. Each addon has its icon, title, description, a "more" link, and a disable, uninstall and preferences button. On the more page (trying a few) I don't see any indication either. Where does it show for you?

I believe you need to install the add-on compatibility reporter add-on to see the marking (since the add-on modifies the add-on listing). See https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-compat... .

Thanks for the correction.

Thanks much for the info! I'll give it a try.

That's the quote that jumped out to me too. I moved to Chrome about 5-6 years ago, and I'm utterly shocked that they haven't done this yet. I remember this being the reason I switched to Chrome.

And they still haven't done it? In 6 years? No wonder I'm still using Chrome...

Adding multi-process support is the single biggest change ever made to Firefox. It was enormous. That's why it took so long.

Took, or taking? It's still not delivered AFAIK.

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