The big change is almost here, as Mozilla promised in 2015

Jun 8, 2016 17:10 GMT  ·  By

After having it for seven years in the making, the Mozilla Foundation is finally ready to roll out e10s (Electrolysis) support, and it's starting with the release of Firefox 48 Beta, which was introduced hours ago.

In layman's terms, Electrolysis, or e10s as everybody calls them, is the ability to run Firefox in multi-process mode. Mozilla says that, in its initial phase, e10s will split the browser's GUI into a separate process and the operations needed to render Web pages into another. By doing this, Firefox will be avoiding situations where the entire browser crashes.

With e10s, Firefox's UI will continue to work, and when the content rendering functions crash, the users can simply reload the page and start over again without closing their entire browser. In upcoming versions of Firefox, e10s will also run each extension in its own process.

e10s started out as an experiment, are now a must-have

The feature has been in the works with the Mozilla Foundation ever since 2009, when everybody looked at it like a wacky project, but it has become necessary in recent years.

In 2015, Mozilla announced it would be putting all its efforts into bringing e10s into the stable branch. The news didn't go well with a lot of developers, mainly because e10s caused many problems with extensions, some of which had to be rewritten to work on top of two separate processes, instead of one.

Electrolysis support was first added in the Firefox Nightly edition last December, and the Foundation said it got good results and is now ready to push it to the stable branch.

Not all Firefox 48 users will get e10s, only 50%

Firefox developer Asa Dotzler explained on his blog yesterday that the Foundation was in full control of which users get e10s support, thanks to telemetry controls in their browsers.

E10s is also turned off by default, so when users update to the stable branch of Firefox 48, expected in August, Mozilla will force only a small number of these users to switch to e10s, by enabling this feature in their browser's core.

Initially, the Foundation says that only 1 percent of all Firefox users will get e10s, which is a number similar to the previous Nightly userbase. The Foundation plans to compare results and see how Firefox 48 fares.

Ten days later, the Foundation plans to move other users to e10s, until it slowly reaches 50 percent of the userbase. This number is what Mozilla estimates are the users who don't use extensions.

Users using Firefox extensions, Windows XP will have to wait

Users who employ Firefox extensions, screen readers, use RTL fonts, or are using Windows XP will have to wait a few more months for e10s support, which is slated to arrive in Firefox 49.

"We want 100% of our release users to benefit from this massive improvement. After that, we’ll be working on support for multiple content processes," Dotzler wrote. "With that foundation in place, the next projects are sandboxing for security, and isolating extensions into their own processes."

Benchmark tests by Eric Rahm have shown that Firefox running on e10s is almost 20 percent faster than previous Firefox versions.

Once Mozilla gets e10s rollout out of the way, next one up will be the WebExtensions API, the other "major breaking change" slated for Firefox's core.

Firefox 48 Beta is available for download right now via Softpedia, for Linux, Mac, and Windows users. You can't automatically update to it, and you'll have to run the installer on top of your previous Firefox installation folder.