[e10s] Changes to the browser.tabs.remote preference in desktop Firefox

Bill McCloskey

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Feb 13, 2014, 8:33:09 PM2/13/14

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Hi everyone,

I just wanted to make a quick announcement about preference changes for out-of-process tabs. Bug 960783, which landed recently, added a "New OOP Window" menu option to open a new window with out-of-process tabs. Right now this option is only enabled on Macs because it requires OMTC, but it will move to other platforms as they get OMTC. It's also restricted to nightly.

This change required some reinterpretation of the existing browser.tabs.remote preference. We use this pref in a fair number of places, so I want to make sure that everyone understands how it works now. This is the new setup:

If browser.tabs.remote = false, then remote (i.e., out of process) tabs are completely inaccessible. This is how we'll keep this feature disabled in non-nightly builds.

If browser.tabs.remote = true and browser.tabs.remote.autostart = false, then browser windows will normally be in-process. However, the user will see a new menu option, "New OOP Window" that will open a window with remote tabs. This configuration is now the default in nightly on Macs. For non-OMTC platforms, browser.tabs.remote=false will remain the default.

If browser.tabs.remote = true and browser.tabs.remote.autostart = true, then browser windows will normally have remote tabs. However, the user will see a new menu option, "New In-process Window" that will open a window with in-process tabs. This configuration is for people who want to test e10s more extensively.

We're hoping that exposing the "New OOP Window" menu item will make it easier for people to test electrolysis.

-Bill

Chris Peterson

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Feb 13, 2014, 9:54:43 PM2/13/14

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On 2/13/14, 5:33 PM, Bill McCloskey wrote:
> We're hoping that exposing the "New OOP Window" menu item will make it easier for people to test electrolysis.

When you file e10s bugs, please include "[e10s]" in the bug summary
and/or make your new bug block one of the e10s tracking bugs:

• Bug 879538 for Gecko/core bugs (alias: core-e10s)
• Bug 653064 for Firefox/front-end bugs (alias: fxe10s)
• Bug 905436 for addon compat bugs (alias: e10s-addons)

btw, I suggested to Bill that we rename "New OOP Window" to "New e10s
Window" because people might not make the immediate connection that "OOP
Window" means e10s.

chris

Milan Sreckovic

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Feb 14, 2014, 2:22:19 PM2/14/14

to Bill McCloskey, dev-tech-e...@lists.mozilla.org, dev-pl...@lists.mozilla.org

Very cool.

Changing the preferences requires restart, I presume?

--
- Milan

> We're hoping that exposing the "New OOP Window" menu item will make it easier for people to test electrolysis.
>

> -Bill
> _______________________________________________
> dev-platform mailing list
> dev-pl...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform

Chris Peterson

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Feb 14, 2014, 2:52:38 PM2/14/14

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On 2/14/14, 11:22 AM, Milan Sreckovic wrote:
> Changing the preferences requires restart, I presume?

Changing the browser.tabs.remote or browser.tabs.remote.autostart prefs
does require a browser restart, but browser.tabs.remote is already
enabled by default in OS X. You will only need to toggle
browser.tabs.remote on Windows and Linux. Those platforms are blocked on
OMTC bugs.

btw, I convinced billm that we should rename the e10s menu item from
"New OOP Window" to "New e10s Window".

chris

Robert Kaiser

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Feb 14, 2014, 3:29:13 PM2/14/14

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Bill McCloskey schrieb:

> I just wanted to make a quick announcement about preference changes for out-of-process tabs. Bug 960783, which landed recently, added a "New OOP Window" menu option to open a new window with out-of-process tabs. Right now this option is only enabled on Macs because it requires OMTC, but it will move to other platforms as they get OMTC. It's also restricted to nightly.

Hrm, we just recently added an annotation to crashes that states if the
e10s pref is on or not, sounds like you just completely obsoleted this.
Has the annotation be changed so we can still determine if a crash of
the main process happened with e10s involved?

KaiRo

Bill McCloskey

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Feb 14, 2014, 3:38:30 PM2/14/14

to Robert Kaiser, dev-pl...@lists.mozilla.org

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Robert Kaiser" <ka...@kairo.at>
> To: dev-pl...@lists.mozilla.org
> Sent: Friday, February 14, 2014 12:29:13 PM
> Subject: Re: [e10s] Changes to the browser.tabs.remote preference in desktop Firefox
>
> Hrm, we just recently added an annotation to crashes that states if the
> e10s pref is on or not, sounds like you just completely obsoleted this.
> Has the annotation be changed so we can still determine if a crash of
> the main process happened with e10s involved?

We now annotate the crash report with DOMIPCEnabled=1 iff the user has ever opened an out-of-process window since startup.

-Bill

Leman Bennett (Omega X)

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Feb 14, 2014, 4:04:08 PM2/14/14

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What is the status of OMTC for other platforms? It seems that the
movement to get this to other platforms has stalled.

--
==================================
~Omega X
MozillaZine Nightly Tester

Nicolas Silva

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Feb 15, 2014, 5:37:29 AM2/15/14

to Leman Bennett (Omega X), dev-platform

We are working on getting OMTC to perform well on Windows. D3D11 OMTC may
not be too far off, D3D9 will have to wait for tiling to be ready though.
On Linux there are a few glitches here and there and If we want to ship it
we'll have to investigate performance and probably implement texture from
pixmap but this is not staffed so it's a good place for external
contributions. I haven't been following closely the state of the software
backend for each platform but there's some activity on bugzilla.
In general I think we have a problem when resizing windows where the
compositor is one frame later than the window manager which doesn't look
good (Linux, Windows).

Cheers,

Nical