Electrolysis/Firefox

Background

This is the home page for all things relating to getting Firefox up and running with Electrolysis. The Mozilla platform will use separate processes to display the browser UI, web content, and plugins. The working name for this project is Electrolysis, sometimes shortened to e10s.

Status

We are currently still in the planning phase.

Goals

Initial goals:

• Provide better application UI responsiveness
• Improve stability from slow rendering or crashes caused by content
• Improve performance, especially on multi-core machines

Implementation

The implementation path will take a phased approach. Beyond Phase 1, we have not fully planned this out so more detail will be added as we make progress.

• Phase 1: Get Firefox up and running with e10s turned on.
• Phase 2: Cleanup what was done after Phase 1.
• Phase 3: Make the browser work properly. Start to think about parallel projects, testing, metrics.
• Phase 4: ...
• Phase 5: ...

Questions

There are some big open questions around the implementation details and approach. These are not fully formed but we are keeping track of them since more stuff will come up as we complete Phase 1.

I have put together a page with all the musings

Testing and Metrics

We would like to start thinking about clarifying performance targets as well as how we are going measure them. We have started to put this together as well here.