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Firefox 48 will come with “Electrolysis” (process per tab) enabled

Firefox 48, which is currently in the beta stage, is expected to be released to stable branch users in August 2016. A notable change Mozilla developers are going to enable by default in this release is the multiprocess mode, known as "electrolysis" or just e10s. This will be enabled for at least some users.

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firefox logo bannerAs stated in the official announcement:

E10S is short for “Electrolysis”. Similar to how chemists can use the technique called electrolysis to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, we’re using project Electrolysis to split Firefox into a UI process and a content process. Splitting UI from content means that when a web page is devouring your computer's processor, your tabs and buttons and menus won't lock up too.

With Firefox 48, e10s will be enabled for 1% of users who do not use add-ons mostly. If this experiment is problem free, then the percentage of users for whom e10s is enabled can be increased. If it causes issues, Mozilla developers can terminate it.

With Firefox 49, e10s is planned to be enabled for all users who use Firefox without add-ons. According to Mozilla, 40% of all Firefox users never use add-ons.

When enabled, e10s allows the browser to render every tab content in a separate process, which is independent from the main browser process. This should increase the security of the browser, make its user interface more responsive and speed up Firefox on multicore CPUs.

The downside of this change will be incompatibilities with many popular extensions including NoScript, Ghostery, Flash Video Downloader and Adblock Edge. Source: Asa Dotzler.

What do you think about this change? Do you welcome the upcoming Electrolysis technology in Firefox or do you think that losing add-on compatibility is not worth it?

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Author: Sergey Tkachenko

Sergey Tkachenko is a software developer who started Winaero back in 2011. On this blog, Sergey is writing about everything connected to Microsoft, Windows and popular software. Follow him on Telegram, Twitter, and YouTube.

2 thoughts on “Firefox 48 will come with “Electrolysis” (process per tab) enabled”

  1. The reasons why I’m using Firefox (Cyberfox and Palemoon) are two:

    1) it’s not a multiprocess browser;
    2) I’m using a lot of addons.

    So I won’t use a multiprocess Firefox with no addons.

    1. The same here.
      I think this is a bad idea to make change FF to the multiprocess browser.
      It will eat a notable amount of system resources.
      And I also use a lot of add-ons.

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