Why is Google Chrome so much faster than Firefox?

i think it's clear that by snappy, he means fast. from what i know, chrome consumes more resources than ff. although i do find chrome to be faster when both the browsers are in their first run, i feel with time, firefox is the one that remains stable and makes me cringe less.

What does that mean? Will the incompatible addons simple be disabled or not working completely? Or will the whole browser crash randomly?


Edit: I tried it and so far nothing unusual happened. All addons seem to be still activated, but maybe all of them were compatible? It did say that e10s was disabled due to addons, but I do have a few addon installed that are deactivated which might have been the reason?

Just do what I have done.
I don't use any other browser except for Firefox so I am blissfully unaware of how much better other browsers are.

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That may be true but I heard / misunderstood something different and experienced the change. Now Firefox has the ability to let a tab crash without bringing down the whole browser.

I was used to the notification "Firefox just crashed. Do you want to restore these tabs?"
I was surprised by the notification "A tab just crashed. Would you like to restore it?"

I actually only had one addon that turned off multiproccess, it was a popup blocker. I uninstalled it immediately, for a better one that also prevented ad tab redirects (those are the worse).

Yeah, actually the multiprocess contents feature is already in latest version of Firefox but it is not enabled by default. By default you can have only one content process (you can change this number by changing dom.ipc.processCount parameter in about:config) and some other processes for NPAPI plugin, web extensions, UI etc. So if one of these processes will crash your "core browser process" will still be running. You can actually see all the processes and websites/add-ons handled by them in 'about:performance'. The new thing in 54 will be enabling 4 content processes by default.

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How exactly did you find that out?


For listing the processes it might be useful, but I question the rest of that feature :wink:

54.0
Firefox Release

June 13, 2017
Version 54.0, first offered to Release channel users on June 13, 2017

Today's release is the first to run Firefox using multiple operating system processes for web page content, making Firefox faster and more stable than ever. Learn more about how multiple processes strike a “just right” balance between performance and memory use on the Mozilla Blog. Dive into the details (including performance benchmarks) on Medium.

We'd also like to extend a special thank you to all of the new Mozillians who contributed to this release of Firefox!

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/54.0/releasenotes/

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Follow up with details to that:

As of right nowt the gist of the matter is

By default, Firefox now creates up to 4 separate processes for web page content. So, your first 4 tabs each use those 4 processes, and additional tabs run using threads within those processes. Multiple tabs within a process share the browser engine that already exists in memory, instead of each creating their own.

You can definitely see how the memory fills up when you open new tabs, but it's just around 200 MB per tab and I have 16GB, so I am not worried about it. In fact, I raised the 4 processes limit to 8 processes and so far I haven't noticed any issues. The only thing that I feel like you trade for the crash resilience, is performance for forking new processes whenever you open a new tab (while you're under the limit of course). I can clearly see the allocation happening in the browser's tab bar, but this might even be due to my suite of addons that I have installed. :wink:

I'm using Nightly. It's stupid fast!

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Chrome operates out of ram and firefox runs out of the activity space on your spinning rust.

Firefox runs on old tech, Gecko rendering engine. Safari and Chrome use the WebKit rendering engine.

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why can't firefox do the same?

Because they're on different codebases. Firefox is implementing new engine features in the release candidate versions that really speed things up.

This question is basically "why isn't firefox chrome"

yeah man!

firefox is getting chromier by the release

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But Chrome is probably also not getting less chromier. :wink:

True the code is open source....But actually making matching code takes brains. Without brains you're a spoon feed cripple.

spoon feed cripple , new movie coming out this fall

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