Top all-time · #3533
B
Bill McCloskey
Personal blog · billmccloskey.wordpress.comprogrammingsystems
Bill McCloskey's personal blog at billmccloskey.wordpress.com covers programming and systems. Since 2013, 21 different Hacker News readers have linked it 23 times, most often “Mozilla's Quantum Project”. The last post was in 2016, but the archive is still widely read.
23mentions?
21HN people?
2013–2025first – last linked?
Just another WordPress.com site
Most-linked posts?
- Mozilla's Quantum Project7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2016-10-27
- Firefox Add-on Changes5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2015-08-21
- Multiprocess Firefox5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2013-12-05
- Multiprocess Firefox2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-12-10
What Hacker News says?
Searchfox didn't exist back then, "there [was] only xul", I mean MXR of course. Then MXR got replaced by DXR, itself replaced in 2020 by Searchfox (introduced in 2016). https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/decommission-dxr/69475 https://billmccloskey.wordpress.com/2016/06/07/searchfox/
Comment linking /2016/06/07/searchfox/
on “Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo”Submitted Multiprocess Firefox as a story · 415 points
HN discussionSo Firefox does support multi-processed tabs through Electrolysis (its IPC layer). From what I understand this is used primarily on Firefox OS to sandbox app runtimes. Doing one process per tab, which is what Chrome does, comes at a very steep cost in increased memory usage. If you compare a Chrome and Firefox instance holding 20 or 30 tabs, the memory consumption is going to be dramatically different. Bill McCloske…
Comment linking /2013/12/05/multiprocess-firefox/
on “Firefox 29”Submitted Firefox Add-on Changes as a story · 14 points
HN discussion> "Would you mind linking to some of those blogposts." A quick parsing of https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis yields "Memory Usage of Firefox with e10s Enabled" [1] and its followup "Are they slim yet?" [2], with [1] closing with these words: "Simply put: the more content processes we use, the more memory we use. On the plus side it’s not a 1:1 factor, with 8 content processes we see roughly a doubling of memory u…
Comment linking /2013/12/05/multiprocess-firefox/
on “Update on Multi-Process Firefox”Submitted Mozilla's Quantum Project as a story · 5 points
HN discussionMozilla engineer Bill McCloskey describes how Quantum DOM will use both multiple OS processes and cooperatively-scheduled, user-space threads to preempt and throttle iframes and background tabs: https://billmccloskey.wordpress.com/2016/10/27/mozillas-quan...
Comment linking /2016/10/27/mozillas-quantum-project/
on “A Quantum Leap for the Web”Submitted Mozilla's Quantum Project (in detail) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI would be astonished if Servo is usable as a mass-market web browser in 12 months. Writing a rendering engine is hard because there is quarter of a century of legacy to deal with. By the metric of "can I use this for 100% of my browsing needs" Servo is far from being complete. Much of Mozilla's "quantum" work is actually about improving C++ code e.g. the Quantum DOM project [1], which is a drive to improve scheduli…
Comment linking /2016/10/27/mozillas-quantum-project/
on “Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo”Submitted Multiprocess Firefox as a story · 1 points
HN discussionNot yet, but they're working on it: https://billmccloskey.wordpress.com/2016/10/27/mozillas-quan... and a preliminary version is in Chrome 56: https://www.chromestatus.com/features/5701844080787456
Comment linking /2016/10/27/mozillas-quantum-project/
on “Why are browsers so slow?”> tab leaks it can freeze the whole browser Process per tab is _almost_ ready: http://billmccloskey.wordpress.com/2013/12/05/multiprocess-f... You can play with it by setting `browser.tabs.remote` to true in about:config.
Comment linking /2013/12/05/multiprocess-firefox/
on “Firefox 27 Released”Back in 2013 the increase from one process to two processes were 10MB. https://billmccloskey.wordpress.com/2013/12/05/multiprocess-...
Comment linking /2013/12/05/multiprocess-firefox/
on “Multiprocess Firefox”Regarding Vimperator: https://billmccloskey.wordpress.com/2015/08/21/firefox-add-o...
Comment linking /2015/08/21/firefox-add-on-changes/
on “The Future of Developing Firefox Add-ons”First, see https://billmccloskey.wordpress.com/2015/08/21/firefox-add-o... 1. these ideas are being announced far in advance of any actual changes 2. firefox devs (see link above) actively want to support current popular extensions, by adding to the Web Extension APIs In fact, you can participate in this discussion with Mozilla devs more directly: https://webextensions.uservoice.com/forums/315663-webextensi... Nobod…
Comment linking /2015/08/21/firefox-add-on-changes/
on “The likely end of DownThemAll”As to NoScript: - from a linked Mozilla blog post: > [...] A major challenge we face is that many Firefox add-ons cannot possibly be built using either WebExtensions or the SDK as they currently exist. Over the coming year, we will seek feedback from the development community, and will continue to develop and extend the WebExtension API to support as much of the functionality needed by the most popular Firefox exten…
Comment linking /2015/08/21/firefox-add-on-changes/
on “The likely end of DownThemAll”> Rust language in Gecko is an important part of Project Quantum. For anybody who missed this, Project Quantum is a Mozilla project to dramatically improve Gecko. Part of this project is to bring in Servo components like CSS and WebRender, hence the Rust dependency. More awesome info: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum https://medium.com/mozilla-tech/a-quantum-leap-for-the-web-a... https://billmccloskey.wordpress.com/…
Comment linking /2016/10/27/mozillas-quantum-project/
on “Rust required to build Gecko”The overall name of the project is Quantum but you have to dig in a bit to find out about the specific sub projects and how they work or plan to work. Overview: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum CSS: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/08/inside-a-super-fast-css-en... DOM: https://billmccloskey.wordpress.com/2016/10/27/mozillas-quan... Rendering: https://www.masonchang.com/blog/2016/7/18/a-short-walkthroug...
Comment linking /2016/10/27/mozillas-quantum-project/
on “Intel's flagship 10th-gen desktop CPU has 10 cores, reaches 5.3GHz”http://billmccloskey.wordpress.com/2013/12/05/multiprocess-f... "The total memory usage for multiprocess Firefox is only 10MB greater than single-process Firefox. We should be able to shrink this difference with some effort" As for the excess memory usage on chrome, "OneTab" might help https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/onetab/chphlpgkkbo... (It's available on Firefox) https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox…
Comment linking /2013/12/05/multiprocess-firefox/
on “Electrolysis – run web content in a separate process from Firefox”I think Mozilla is highly aware of the importance of the extension ecosystem. They don't want to alienate people https://billmccloskey.wordpress.com/2015/08/21/firefox-add-o... https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions/FAQ#Which_add-ons_wil... There are also proposals for ensuring that innovation can still be driven by extension developers: https://discourse.mozilla-community.org/t/proposal-native-js...
Comment linking /2015/08/21/firefox-add-on-changes/
on “WebExtensions in Firefox 45”It is a different group of people that are working on multiprocess Firefox. There was an update about the status a month ago: http://billmccloskey.wordpress.com/2013/12/05/multiprocess-f... Making e10s work is a long process of converting existing code over to working when webpages are running in a separate process. For instance, if you do "copy", then the actual copying is occurring in the child process, but of cou…
Comment linking /2013/12/05/multiprocess-firefox/
on “A big step towards Firefox generational and compacting GC”If it doesn't yet, it will. Support for add-ons like Tree Style Tabs has been on their radar since development of the new API started: 1. https://billmccloskey.wordpress.com/2015/08/21/firefox-add-o... 2. https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions#Additional_APIs 3. https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions/RoadMap
Comment linking /2015/08/21/firefox-add-on-changes/
on “WebExtensions in Firefox 48”Firefox has a long way to go. * Australis * Electrolysis ( http://billmccloskey.wordpress.com/2013/12/05/multiprocess-f... ) * Fx Accounts Speed wise, I really think Fx is pretty much on par with Chrome. There are areas where Fx is faster and Chrome is faster. In general, both are great. If you install a lot of addons/extensions, I will expect some performance hit. But that's an not excuse, yet I personally not a bi…
Comment linking /2013/12/05/multiprocess-firefox/
on “2014 Goals”
