E10s IS a hack. Multiprocess at all is a hack from my point of view. Did old browsers need to spam your task manager with multiple processes to perform good? No! Did ADOBE FLASH need to spam you with multiple processes? No! Did Opera 12/Presto opera need to spam you with multiple processes? No! Did old web browsers need it? No!jd2066 wrote:I will agree that Mozilla did disrespect add-on developers who created whole themes for the browser and add-on developers that created XUL-based extensions that used APIs that will or cannot be recreated as WebExtensions APIs.RexyDallas wrote:I agree that they disrespected add-on developers, and especially the theme developers. Their excuse for dropping themes is that they have to constantly be updated. Same is said for add-ons. Yet they are the ones who constantly overhaul their browser. They switched to the hack known as e10s, and just as add-on developers were getting caught up with that change, they remove add-on support altogether. Safety is also an excuse unless you pander to dumb people who actually believes they have anyone but them-self to blame if they install an untrustworthy add-on. Oh wait, they already forced add-ons to be signed, so that excuse makes no sense! By using that excuse for removing so many features, Mozilla is only marginally better than those people.
Also that Mozilla disrespected the users of the add-ons those developers created by making it not possible for those users to use the add-ons they wanted to use.
However, I don't think e10s (Multi-Process Support) was a hack, it was a fundamental change to the Gecko rendering engine that changed how Content (Web Pages in Tabs, Popups, etc) and User Interface (Menubar, Toolbar, Tabbar, Sidebars and other elements built using XUL) functioned.
Without e10s (Multi-Process Support) enabled (which I think you can still disable in Firefox 57 via about:config preference), the Gecko Rendering Engine used exactly 1 Firefox process for all loaded Content and the User Interface.
With the same group of pages, Opera 12/Presto uses 154,824K of ram in one process, and chrome uses 287,656K of ram in 13 processes. Chrome's scrolling feels slower, and because of being multiprocess, Chrome's tab switching takes a lot longer than Opera's almost-instant tab switching. Opera wins in every category against the newest version of Chrome.
Firefox 4.0, which was released in a similar time of opera 12, and was after Gecko started getting bloated again, seems to regularly vary between 180,000 and 260,000. Firefox 4.0 also had HCTBP, DOM inspector, and Element inspector installed. Firefox 4.0 has faster scrolling than modern browsers on simplistic pages, though, and has near instant tab switching.
Firefox 3.6, peak unbloated Gecko, is generally around 70,000-75,000 idling, and very gradually gets to around 110,000 when scrolling and generally being active. The memory used when scrolling gets freed seconds after I stop scrolling. It scrolls faster than Opera 12 on simplistic pages, and has even more near-instant tab switching. Opening and closing tabs in Firefox 3.6 is also near-instant. That is generally the way Gecko was before 2.0.
Also, by "simplistic pages", I basically mean all of the pages except bing.
These are the pages I am using:
The Gaia Community one is a web archive page. The Web Archive's floating bar doesn't render properly, but whatever. Both "test" pages are image searches, and the Runescape page is the runescape.com/splash.
It is a hack because they can't find a way to actually improve their speed, because chrome did it, and because they are desperate for new users. It's funny. Mozilla removed all of the bloat just to make it probably even more bloated than it was before. And no, XUL is not a source of bloat, and neither is the add-on system. Firefox 4.0 had both of those, and so did Firefox 3.6.
I can't find out how to download an old version of Chrome, so whatever.