Firefox to Get Boost from Multithreading

Terry Olaes

Terry Olaes

I Used to be the [H] News Guy
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Mozilla is working on application multithreading for Firefox and hope to have it in place over the next two years. Meanwhile, Google and IE8 already have it partially enabled.

As well as allowing the software to take advantage of multicore microprocessors to boost responsiveness, the enhancement would also improve browser stability, the company said in a news blog on the subject.
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Are Chrome and IE8 the only multithreading browsers? Is opera multithreaded?
 
That was my first reaction when I saw the title of the thread also: 2 years?!?! Good lord... does it really take that long? By then Google Chrome will have carved out a chunk of the "market share" of browsers and probably moved past Firefox... 2 freakin' years!?!?! Really?

Hey, I've seen stranger things happen. ;)
 
Not much of a surprise, Vista's been out over 2 years and FF still doesn't run in 'protected mode' (sandboxed.) IE's had this 'minor' security feature since Vista's release... Last I heard, it's on Mozilla's 'to do list' for 3.5 or 4.0.
 
First they need to make FF more stable. I've noticed since the release of 3.0, each update has progressively made my browser crash often. I don't get it? And it isn't just my main machine, my laptop and work computer.
 
Yeah....I can't wait for the VAST improvements that will come to by browsing experience because the application is multi-threaded. I'm sure it will completely change the way I use the Internet. :rolleyes:
 
I guess the most absolutely shocking aspect to all of this is:

You mean with dual core processors and even quad cores having been on the market for what, 2, almost 3 years now, the Firefox developers are just now getting around to announcing it's a future addition?!?!?!

What the hell have they been doing, living in a static warp bubble or something? (Ok, that's a stretch but seeing as Star Trek came out yesterday... well... you figure it out) :D
 
wiseoracle said:
First they need to make FF more stable. I've noticed since the release of 3.0, each update has progressively made my browser crash often. I don't get it? And it isn't just my main machine, my laptop and work computer.
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3.0.8 and 3.0.9 just crashed constantly on my desktop. I had to go back to 3.0.7 for a while, but 3.0.10 seems to be OK. Oddly enough the other two computers I use Firefox on did not have any problems. I suspect it may have been an issue with Vista, since the other two are running XP.
 
not sure what every does to make firefox crash, I had a bad memory module causing it to crash
 
Multithreading huh? Fancy. I agree its pretty weird they have waited so long to implement it. It is even weirder it will take 2 years to implement. Anyways I am using firefox 3.5 beta (have been since beta2) and have yet to get 1 crash or weirdness. But maybe thats because is karate chop all the scriptvertisements with noscript and abp. When I load a website I am only talking to one site, not 10. Maybe that's where multithreading helps out? Works fine for me the way it is.
 
I love how IE8 puts each tab in a completely separate process, not only to improve performance but to prevent one foobarred site load from bringing down the whole browser. The first time I experience a crash in IE8, I was darn impressed to see that only one of the ten tabs I had open went down, and it restarted to the same site within a few seconds. Almost as if nothing had happened at all.

Would be nice if Firefox could do the same.
 
^EDIT: I guess I should give credit to Google Chrome for being the first to implement that feature. Props to them as well.
 
im on a 1.1Ghz Athlon XP

and when 3 tabs open at once Im stuck at 100% CPU usage, so I can kinda see where mutli-threading can improve 'responsiveness'
 
I use FF3 on an older ThinkPad I have, Pentium 3 1.13 with 1GB of PC133 RAM in it, and the only time I see 100% max CPU time is when I hit some page that's got Flash banners, or some ridiculously hideous Javascript going on. Loading simple textual content on pages doesn't use much CPU time at all, but all that active content, that's what kills browsers and older machines these days.
 
450 said:
Are Chrome and IE8 the only multithreading browsers? Is opera multithreaded?
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I don't think so. I've been using O for about 8 years, but their dev team's significantly smaller than anyone elses. IE/Safari/Chrome all have corporate warchests. Opera/Firefox are primarily funded by revenue from browser search boxes, and FF's market share gives them much more money from that.
 
Development should be for multiple core, multithreaded and 128bit compatible (who knows when they'll get it done) :D
 
This is only welcome!

Thanks developers, adobe... when will you guys start to learn how to adopt stuff fast? (64 bit is sooo hard)
Yeah, thats what im talking about, 5 years took them before we saw alpha?.....
lol :p
 
Next too years 2? That's taking some time. Though Firefox has always been good for me.
 
I used to get crashes occasionally during FF 2.X on XP, but I've never had a single FF crash on Vista. From version 2.X to the most current release, I don't remember a single crash happening. Don't know what it is, but things seem to work fine.

Honestly - I didn't know that FF wasn't ALREADY multi-threaded. I guess it won't hurt to have multi-thread support added, but hell - it works fine already.
 
stop!theradio said:
I used to get crashes occasionally during FF 2.X on XP, but I've never had a single FF crash on Vista. From version 2.X to the most current release, I don't remember a single crash happening. Don't know what it is, but things seem to work fine.

Honestly - I didn't know that FF wasn't ALREADY multi-threaded. I guess it won't hurt to have multi-thread support added, but hell - it works fine already.
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Yea I thought so too. But yea I do like the fact that Chrome+IE8 are sandboxed.
 
why do we need a multi threading browser? is there some reason they shouldn't take their time? does web browsing take more then what a single modern core could do? I am going to check but I can't see a modern cpu being overtaxed with surfing. Maybe java based apps? is it practical?
 
Valset said:
why do we need a multi threading browser? is there some reason they shouldn't take their time? does web browsing take more then what a single modern core could do? I am going to check but I can't see a modern cpu being overtaxed with surfing. Maybe java based apps? is it practical?
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Check your CPU usage when loading a page; it actually jumps more than you would expect.
 
Joe Average said:
I guess the most absolutely shocking aspect to all of this is:

You mean with dual core processors and even quad cores having been on the market for what, 2, almost 3 years now, the Firefox developers are just now getting around to announcing it's a future addition?!?!?!

What the hell have they been doing, living in a static warp bubble or something? (Ok, that's a stretch but seeing as Star Trek came out yesterday... well... you figure it out) :D
Click to expand...

They have been around a lot longer than that. I built my first Athlon X2 socket 939 machine over 3 years ago, and even then it wasn't new tech.

First AMD Athlon X2 cpu came out in May 2005, which is 4 years ago.

So 4 years and they are just now starting to look
 
eh don't care. personally i don't want to check my task manager and seeing a ton of threads for just my browser, maybe if it could collapse into one item then it wouldn't be so annoying. i haven't had firefox crash in a long time. running 3.5 beta 4
 
wiseoracle said:
First they need to make FF more stable. I've noticed since the release of 3.0, each update has progressively made my browser crash often. I don't get it? And it isn't just my main machine, my laptop and work computer.
Click to expand...

+1 - Team FF lost the plot with v3. I never had any trouble with 2.x, but 3 is slow and prone to instability. As with you, wiseoracle, I am seeing this on multiple machines (including those of my colleagues). Happily using Chrome ATM.
 
I have no idea what some of you do to get FF to crash so much. I can recall maybe a handful of crashes in FF in either Vista or XP, and I have been using it since the Firebird days.
 
Jay777 said:
They re-wrote the whole thing recently using a different programming code and its currently available as 3.10 beta. So far it feels a lot lighter than V3 but not many addons work with it (which might have exaggerated the speed boost I noticed). This link does say this engine uses new worker thread processing...

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/03/firefox-31-beta-3-officially-released.ars
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I switched to Chrome and found lack of support for many add-ons a pain. It's a browser we should not have to worry about being bogged down.
 
The reason it has taken so long?
Out of Chrome, FF, IE* ONLY FF is multi-OS and Multi-Arch

It is cheaper/quicker for a MS-Windows App to make a new thread over a new process
It is cheaper/quicker for a Linux App to make a new process over a new thread

FF has alot large demograph to cater for
Likewise its only with the recent VM performance from FF and Chrome which means that Javascript can be abused alot more that more performance from the browser is needed
 
I must say I don't really see the big draw in parallelizing Firefox. I'd rather have them work on single-threaded performance first.

Single page rendering doesn't strike me as a particularly parallelization task (nor does it tax my CPU very much), so the major performance boosts would come from loading multiple pages simultaneously.
 
eeyrjmr said:
The reason it has taken so long?
Out of Chrome, FF, IE* ONLY FF is multi-OS and Multi-Arch

It is cheaper/quicker for a MS-Windows App to make a new thread over a new process
It is cheaper/quicker for a Linux App to make a new process over a new thread

FF has alot large demograph to cater for
Likewise its only with the recent VM performance from FF and Chrome which means that Javascript can be abused alot more that more performance from the browser is needed
Click to expand...

Oh you mean like Microsoft only makes Internet Exporer and have all the time in the world because that's all they make?
 
eeyrjmr said:
It is cheaper/quicker for a MS-Windows App to make a new thread over a new process
It is cheaper/quicker for a Linux App to make a new process over a new thread
Click to expand...

Really? IE8 implements multithreading using multiple processes; one for each tab, up to a certain point depending on the number of processing cores you have.
 
HOCP4ME said:
Really? IE8 implements multithreading using multiple processes; one for each tab, up to a certain point depending on the number of processing cores you have.
Click to expand...

This really depends on what is meant by the terms process and thread. They're not well defined in terms of their implementations.

Performance issues aside, which I know very little about, for IE8 it wouldn't surprise me if they were separate processes or LWPs on the basis of better reliability and isolation between tabs. Threading traditionally doesn't offer separate address spaces, which is a security hazard. Furthermore, if we're talking user threads, a crash in one will prevent scheduling of the others.

Context switching between processes is much more expensive than switching between (user or kernel) threads, but we're talking about a web browser, which hardly falls under the category of high performance computing.
 
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