Significantly speed up firefox!

[brchan]

I just realized firefox now fully supports multiple processes as of August 2016: http://www.ghacks.net/2016/07/22/multi-process-firefox/

For me it was not enabled by default because of incompatible addons, but after fixing them and then enabling the feature, firefox is way more responsive! Notably it doesn't stutter or freeze anymore when loading web pages, and scrolling is finally as smooth as chromium's. No weird bugs so far, either. As a side note, I highly recommend "Tile tabs" addon which is the only addon of any browser AFAIK that enables true tab splitting. Excellent for multitasking!

Additionally If you want to test an addon, you can still force multiprocess.

[Summilux]

That's a useful tip, thank you.

Following the reading of this blog post, I've fired up Firefox, disabled all the add-ons and updated to the latest version (50.0).
After a browser reboot, the multiprocess function appeared to have been enabled by default.

But it's still memory hungry (as predicted by the blog) and CPU hungry. And that's just with a handful of light tabs...

So it looks like I'll keep using Chrome 99% of the time.

[Dekks]

But it's still memory hungry (as predicted by the blog) and CPU hungry. And that's just with a handful of light tabs... So it looks like I'll keep using Chrome 99% of the time.

That made me laugh given Chrome's memory footprint, personally i've not seen it grab a lot of CPU on the 2 machines it's enabled on.

BTW FF isn't truly multi process yet as the rendering has only 1 process regardless the number of tabs and is automatically disabled if any touchscreen [deemed an accessibility requirement] is detected on top of the add-on compatibility issues. There is an add-on that checks for compatibility that can be found on the Mozilla site.

[RealBlackStuff]

Ever heard of Firemin?
I use that (V3977 Beta), combined with PaleMoon 26.5.0.
PaleMoon's memory usage: between 4-10MB.
I dumped FF years ago.
See also: http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=116497

[Dekks]

Nope but it's windows i assume? i'm happy with FF on newer machines, for the older ones i use qutebrowser.

[Temetka]

Long time since I posted here.

I dumped FF about a year or so ago. It's performance was just atrocious. I now use Edge and Chrome for all my browsing needs. Now that Edge supports addon's I've been using it more and more. Except for on youtube. I have 2 youtube extensions for Chrome that I use. The first gives the whole site a darker appearance which is easier on my eyes and the second blocks ad's inside the video's. If I could do that on Edge, I'd complete my transition to it.

My main laptop is my Surface Pro 4. Although I'm thinking about picking up a Latitude E4310 or maybe a T430s. I can get the Latitude for about $100-ish whereas the T430s is more expensive. But I won't ever buy another laptop without a backlit keyboard. That being said I really, really love this SP4 and next to the T410 that I sold to my co-worker, it's the longest I've ever owned a machine. I usually swap every few months, but the ability to go from laptop to tablet is really handy, and I love the pen for doodling.

Back on topic, when I do run linux (rarely anymore) I use Chromium as IceWeasel (Debian FF branch) is CPU heavy when compared to the other browsers out there. Kind of a shame really, FF was my go to browser for years. But it just got slower and more resource intensive as time went on.

My primary OS is Windows 10 Enterprise and Edge is my main browser followed by Chrome. With the OS and Edge + adblock and hostsman, my machine runs very fast. I have the i5 8GB model of the SP4.

Lovely machine.