Electrolysis

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Goal

The goal of the Electrolysis project ("e10s" for short) is to run web content in a separate process from Firefox itself. The two major advantages of this model are security and performance. Security would improve because the content processes could be sandboxed (although sandboxing the content processes is a separate project from Electrolysis). Performance would improve because the browser UI would not be affected by poor performance of content code (be it layout or JavaScript). Also, content processes could be isolated from each other, which would have similar security and performance benefits.

Although the Gecko platform supports multiple processes, the Firefox frontend is not designed to use them. Work to make the frontend (including addons) support multiple processes was begun in early 2013. The project roadmap has more details.

Enabling and Disabling Electrolysis

To enable or disable e10s, open Nightly's Preferences and check the "Enable E10S" checkbox. You will need to restart Nightly. Alternately, you can also toggle the browser.tabs.remote and browser.tabs.remote.autostart prefs to enable (true) or disable (false) e10s.

Contributing

The simplest way to help out is to file bugs when you find them.

  • Link to all open e10s bugs: http://is.gd/QripTz
    • Please check the open bugs for duplicates before filing a new bug.
  • Link to file new e10s bug: http://is.gd/aTza8A
    • Please include the string "e10s" in the bug summary so we can more easily track your bug.

Most bugs in e10s occur because code in the chrome process tries to access data in a content process. All of the DOM objects for a XUL browser element, as well as its DocShell, live in the content process. Typical access paths are via browser.contentWindow, browser.docShell, or some variation of them. Often, these property accesses will generate errors in the console, which makes these bugs fairly easy to detect. MDN has a good introduction to e10s, useful for both Firefox and add-on developers: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/Working_with_multiprocess_Firefox

What to Expect

Basic browsing should work as expected. Tabs that are loaded remotely (i.e., in a separate process) will have their title underlined. By default, only one content process is used. You can control this with the dom.ipc.processCount preference.

Known Issues

Known issues you might run into when testing e10s:

Add-ons Compatibility

A list of tested add-ons (compatible and incompatible) is available at http://arewee10syet.com. Some popular add-ons that are currently broken with e10s:

Communication

Weekly Team Meeting Thursday at 2:00pm PT for 30 mins
IRC
  • Server: irc.mozilla.org
  • Channel: #e10s
Tracking bugs
Newsgroup/Mailing List
Project branch

People

Project Champion
  • Andreas Gal ( A )
High Level Oversight
  • Johnathan Nightingale ( I )
  • Gavin Sharp ( A )
Engineering Management
  • Brad Lassey ( R )
Project Management
  • Chris Peterson ( R )
QA
  • Juan Becerra (QA lead)
Development Team
  • Nicholas Alexander ( R )
  • Mike Conley ( R )
  • Felipe Gomes (Firefox front-end) ( R )
  • Blake Kaplan ( R )
  • William McCloskey ( R )
  • Jim Mathies ( R )
  • Allison Naaktgeboren ( R )
  • John Schoenick (plugins) ( R )
  • Tom Schuster ( R )
  • Tomislav Jovanovic (addon-sdk) ( R )
Other Teams
  • Accessibility: Alexander Surkov and Trevor Saunders (bug 646596)
  • Addon Developer Relations: Jorge Villalobos
  • Developer Tools: Rob Campbell (bug 875871)
  • IME: Makoto Kato (alternately, Masayuki Nakano) (bug 926798)
  • Jetpack: Dave Townsend
  • OMTC/Windows: Nick Cameron (bug 756608)
  • Printing: bz (bug 927188)
  • Plugins: Josh Aas (OS X), Karl Tomlinson (Linux)
  • Sandboxing: Brian Bondy, Sid Stamm (bug 925570)
  • WebAudio: Ehsan Akhgari (WebAudio works fine in e10s.)
  • WebRTC: Randell Jesup or Eric Rescorla. WebRtc is currently getting ready to go into B2G - mozGetUserMedia will be in 26/1.2, and PeerConnections will be in 28/1.3.
  • e10s tests: Mark Hammond

Here is what the letters following each name stand for, those higher on the list include all those below:

  • R = Responsible for deliverable, in most cases this is anyone writing code.
  • A = Accountable for the final decision making on some aspect of the project, often leadership that is not working on code but have go, no go decision making.
  • C = Needs to be consulted on key topics, often this would be for subject mater experts that need to be consulted but don't have decision making power.
  • I = Needs to be kept informed, those that just need regular status reports sent to them.

Reference

Meeting Notes

For latest meeting notes, see the Meeting Notes Etherpad.

Create a new weekly agenda from the template: <createbox> align=left type=create preload=Electrolysis/Meetings/0-0-0 default=2025-12-18 prefix=Electrolysis/Meetings/ </createbox>

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