With Electrolysis, Firefox should be “less susceptible to freezing and is generally more responsive to input”, Nick Nguyen, vice president of Firefox product, wrote on Tuesday.
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With around half of Firefox 48 beta users now running the new architecture, Mozilla’s going to anoint one per cent of ordinary users – giving it about the same number of guinea pigs as it already has in the beta population. Whew, what a mouthful. Mozilla also nicknamed it Electrolysis or e10s.
The latest version of Firefox 48 include the multi-process for Firefox for Desktop, or the Electrolysis or e10s, which provides separate processing by the browser of web content and browser component, similar to how Chrome has been for years.
When a web page is consuming a large part of your computer’s processing power, tabs, buttons, and menus won’t lock up, said Mozilla. Firefox 51, with a release date of January 24, 2017, will extend multi-process to users running touch-enabled devices, people who need the browser’s accessibility features, and those on versions localized for right-to-left languages such as Hebrew and Arabic.
The most potentially useful update here is Firefox’s new ability to split its workload into multiple processes. Firefox 48 includes Electrolysis (e10s), which is a multi-process that the developers will slowly enable in the first version to contain it. To find if the Electrolysis is enabled on your browser, type “about: support” on the address bar and hit “Enter”. Under the “Application Basics” sub-heading look for the entry called “Multiprocess Windows”. “Wondering if your Firefox instance has enabled e10s?”
Why this matters: Mozilla’s introduction of e10s will bring Firefox closer to functionality at the core of its rival, Google Chrome.
As someone who’s had Firefox crash and hang regularly thanks to problems with rogue plug-ins or tabs, I can only say “full speed ahead”. How that all shakes out in practice is another matter. Chrome has a reputation for eating up too much memory.
To make it easier to understand at first glance for users, Mozilla made a few improvements to the user interface for these warnings.
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The new design simplifies installation for featured add-ons to one click and uses clean images and text to orientate users.
