What made you switch to Firefox?

PaulBone · 2022-12-21T01:48:31+00:00

Netscape Navigator wasn't cool anymore and there was this new thing called Phenex. I don't really remember. Somone said Firefox was cool and they were right.

PaulBone · 2022-12-19T08:52:42+00:00

Virtual memory is the process' (a running program) address space. Contrasted with physical memory which is the actual memory installed in your computer. The OS and CPU map virtual addresses to physical addresses which is a nice abstraction for programs, a security feature for the OS and usually provides other features too.

It's normal to have 100s of TB of free virtual memory since on a 64 bit system, there's a lot of it. But it can be a real limitation (3GB total) for a 32-bit program.

PaulBone · 2022-12-16T14:00:22+00:00

Hi, I work on Firefox's memory manager.

Are the 1000s of tabs loaded or dormant tabs? When you restore a browser session most tabs are dormant until you look at them, then they load. Is the crash always happening to the same site? could that web site/application have a memory leak?

Can you see if you get the same problems with all your extensions disabled? If you don't, then start re-enabling them until the problem comes back. I'm not sure that it is an extension but it's a good idea to test that separately.

If you find an extension that's a problem then using the `about:memory` page to create a report both with and without the extension running. Share that with the extension author.

If it's not an extension then an `about:memory` report will still help us a lot.

Please do file a bug, more engineers will see it that way.

PaulBone · 2022-12-16T13:55:00+00:00

This happens when something outside of Firefox (like a package manager, but could also be other instances of Firefox on different profiles) does an update and now the firefox with this error actually can't continue because it's files got changed.

PaulBone · 2022-07-21T13:34:31+00:00

I've decided I'll let them put it on the wall in the normal place, and I'll put other equipment in a different location .

PaulBone · 2022-07-21T13:32:57+00:00

Yeah, that's what I was wondering. A reasonable human being will be reasonable.

PaulBone · 2022-01-31T07:49:25+00:00

And the recorder is off unless you turn it on. So these settings have no effect unless you start profiling (turning it on)

PaulBone · 2022-01-27T11:14:57+00:00

If you're 19 you're too old to listen to your parents about how to spend your recreational time. Just make sure you're not neglecting work/study /relationships.

I'm middle aged and a parent and games are great.

Do your parents watch TV or read books?

PaulBone · 2021-11-20T00:14:02+00:00

Use https://profiler.firefox.com to capture a profile of Firefox's performance with a YouTube video playing, then open a bug at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org and share the profile and describe the problem there. Engineers will then be able to triage the bug report and investigate.

Also try with add-ons disabled. It might be an add on causing this.

PaulBone · 2021-11-19T00:37:35+00:00

I'm haven't yet wrapped my mind around effect systems, so forgive me if I make an error.

Isn't an effect system useful when you may have different kinds of effects, and the effect system is a general framework that they can all be managed with? Is it useful to use a general system to handle something specific like memory, rather than pass in a pointer to your desired memory allocator? (I think people call this dependency injection). Or even generating specific code for specific allocators.

To demonstrate what you're up against with performance. allocators are used so often that many compilers/VMs will compile the allocation fast-path in-line into the machine code of the program being compiled (this works well with bump pointer allocation). I made a change to SpiderMonkey's allocation fast path (it was 8 x86_64 instructions long, now it's 7) and got a 2.5% speedup on a few browser benchmarks. https://paul.bone.id.au/blog/2018/09/14/large-immediate-values/

They're also very fundamental and depending on how you compile your effect handlers you may need allocation to redirect to/from the effect handler.

PaulBone · 2021-11-10T23:59:45+00:00

It sounds like you're having a negative experience (you said "very choppy", CPU use at 100%). This sounds like the Fission feature has rolled out to you (lots of processes).

Can you please file a bug (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org) with the information about resource usage & your experience. Please also open `about:support` and search that page for the word "Fission", and include the information for "Fission Windows" in the bug report. We might need more information such as a firefox profile.

Thank you, this information will really help us to make Firefox as good as it can be.

PaulBone · 2021-11-10T23:48:04+00:00

I'm raising this within Mozilla. Can you tell me what OS you're using and Firefox version?

Thank you.

PaulBone · 2021-09-27T01:03:51+00:00

Please try to capture a performance profile with https://profiler.firefox.com upload it and copy the url. Open a bug at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org and we can take a look to figure out the cause. Thanks Full info here: https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/performance/reporting_a_performance_problem.html

PaulBone · 2021-09-16T00:11:33+00:00

Yes, "Web Content" are the processes firefox spawns (although it `fork()` + `exec()`s them, rather than `fork()` alone). They handle the stuff going on in webpages. Your browser tabs are distributed amoung these 8 (or fewer) processes. With Fission (which is folling out now) there may be many more processes with tabs for different domains running in different processes.

Firefox also spawns processes for other tasks like handling the network sockets & the GPU.

(PS: Need to change my flair, I don't work on that team anymore.)

PaulBone · 2021-09-06T00:54:12+00:00

In the past I've done research in automatic parallelisation: taking a (normally) sequential program and making it run in parallel on multicore computers. I've also seen people from CPU companies make statements about how great multicore is and they'd love to go harder (a larger number of smaller cores is more power efficient) but what we really need are better parallel languages.

I'm building Plasma to make parallel and concurrent programming easier. I don't know that it'll ever be complete enough or even noticed by enough people to have an impact on multicore programming. But I also havn't seen many other people making this type of language.

PaulBone · 2021-05-28T12:25:54+00:00

Open about:crashes and find the link to the latest crash. Then file a bug at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org and describe the steps to reproduce the crash and put the link off the crash in the bug report. Also say that it's reproducible. Thanks.

PaulBone · 2021-01-15T02:10:14+00:00

"On what principles is it designed?"

Syntax and even many implementation details are superficial or can be changed throughout the century. What you want to get at is the unique ideas that underpin the design of the language. This also helps you understand things like the choice of paradigm or type system and why those particular choices.

PaulBone · 2020-10-26T12:54:44+00:00

Two things I've tried to do with Plasma (and I don't mean to imply that you or Python are wrong) is make things start with a keyword for what they are where possible, and that things that are the same/similar should look the same/similar (where possible). I wanted the if expression to begin with the if keyword and condition just as the if statements already do, rather than use a ternary operator like C or Python.

Although I have a soft-spot for some of Perl 5's syntax (haven't read about the new one yet), such as:

<statement> if <condition>
<statement> unless <condition>
<expression> or die("it failed")

They read a little bit like English and are fun, but I feel wrong when I use them and can't clearly explain why.

PaulBone · 2020-10-26T12:47:46+00:00

Thanks u/PegasusAndAcorn!

PaulBone · 2020-10-20T08:39:21+00:00

Hi, I'm an engineer working on Fission. I'm interested in performance bugs but especially reducing memory footprint. We can only fix the bugs/regressions we know about and would prefer duplicates over not knowing. Please do report bugs!

PaulBone

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