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Even busy pages, like Facebook newsfeeds, spool out smoothly and cleanly. Besides running faster and crashing less, E10S makes websites feel more smooth. The performance improvements are remarkable.
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I’ve been living with this turned on by default in the pre-release version of Firefox (Nightly). 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. This means that a heavy, complex web page in one tab has a much lower impact on the responsiveness and speed in other tabs. With today’s release, Firefox uses up to four processes to run web page content across all open tabs. And today we’re launching our next big phase of the E10s initiative.Ī Faster Firefox With Four Content Processes E10s is the largest change to Firefox code in our history.
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We named our project to split Firefox into multiple processes ‘Electrolysis ’ (or E10s) after the chemical process that divides water into its core elements. Modern browsers split the load into several independent processes. Translation? The old Firefox used a single process to run all the tabs in a browser. To make Firefox run even complex sites faster, we’ve been changing it to run using multiple operating system processes. That often meant a less than perfect browsing experience.
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Up until now, a complex site in one Firefox tab could slow down all the others. The average website today is nearly 2.5 megabytes – the same size as the original version of the game Doom, according to Wired. And the sites and web apps running in those tabs often have lots of things going on– animations, videos, big pictures and more. On the Firefox team, one thing we always hear from our users is that they rely on the web for complex tasks like trip planning and shopping comparisons. With E10s, our new version of Firefox nails the “just right” balance between memory and speed
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