On 22/12/2024 19:12, Ed Cryer wrote:

What the dickens goes on there? Why, wherefore and for what reason.

Spying is the first thing you should think of. spying has become a
normal part of human life because tech companies think that it is the
best way to make money.

How come an intelligent person like yourself can't think of this? You
should always be suspicious of people giving you something free because
there must be something hidden from you. This is where people should be paranoid about everything.



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Ed Cryer <ed@somewhere.in.the.uk> wrote:

I'm quite used to seeing Firefox and all its iterations in Task Manager.
But today I loaded a couple of other browsers, purely out of interest. Firefox had 12 iterations.
Opera had 18.
Safari had 2.

What the dickens goes on there? Why, wherefore and for what reason.

Normally there is one process (your 'iteration') per tab and sometimes
some extra processes for seperate tasks (for example Edge has Crashpad,
GPU process and three Utility: ... processes).

My current Chrome with 9 open tabs has 8 main processes (why one less
than tabs?) and lots and lots of processes in 'Efficiency mode'. Those
are probably tabs which *were* open at some time, now are closed, but
can be re-opened quickly. They use no CPU and relatively little memory
(from 2.8MB to 114.5MB, but most less than 40MB).

With only one empty tab open, Edge has 6 processes and one 6.9MB
process in Efficiency mode.

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On Sun, 12/22/2024 2:12 PM, Ed Cryer wrote:

I'm quite used to seeing Firefox and all its iterations in Task Manager. But today I loaded a couple of other browsers, purely out of interest.
Firefox had 12 iterations.
Opera had 18.
Safari had 2.

What the dickens goes on there? Why, wherefore and for what reason.

Ed

The main problem, is the nature of the labeling of the
processes. If the OS has no way to tell you what they
are, then you won't know. This makes it harder to discover
what the roles of each instance is.

This is a problem with Task Manager. Task Manager
is negligent in a number of ways, and the labeling
issue is just one of them.

In any case, without a lot of explaining, here
is a family enjoying a picnic lunch. One parent
supervises. If the parent is killed (notice the
indentation on one of the displays), that ensures
the family all disappears at the same time. Whereas
if you whack at the children ("choose the wrong Firefox"),
then the child re-forks and appears with a different
PID (process identifier number).

[Picture]

https://i.postimg.cc/gc7YYN5C/firefox-parent-and-children.gif

The processes work as a team. High risk activities
(movie playback) have their own task. If the task dies,
no sweat, the rest of the browser keeps running. A
new movie player child is forked. In this way, the
browser can give the illusion of continuous service,
even when under attack.

The processes use things like named pipes for
communications between them. "How ya doin?"
"Doin fine". The parent and children exchange
idle chatter packets. Some process handles the rendering
of the graphical result.

Originally, there was only one task, and threads
inside handled the details. There was less need for
chatter. Some things were "subroutines" and returned
error codes. There was no banter between processes,
no gathering of statistics as an activity. A single
task can be a lot more tightly coupled. But when
a movie is exploited and the browser process tips over,
the malware involved can get into the machine. The
movie player child on the other hand, doesn't have a lot
of file handles open, and tipping it over is
mostly a waste of time.

This is "process/task isolation".

If you open enough tabs, another child is spun up
to handle the extra tabs. For some of our audience
members who have a radically large number of tabs,
they have an "orange forest" of Firefoxes running :-)
When you first start Firefox, the number of children
isn't the minimum, but it is pretty low, all things
considered.

And once one company did this, there were yells of
"me too!". That is why they're all doing this. Nobody
wanted to be left out of the madness.

This design style uses more RAM, but who is counting.

Paul


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Keywords: VanguardLH,VLH

Ed Cryer <ed@somewhere.in.the.uk> wrote:

I'm quite used to seeing Firefox and all its iterations in Task Manager.
But today I loaded a couple of other browsers, purely out of interest. Firefox had 12 iterations.
Opera had 18.
Safari had 2.

The web browser gets 2 to 4 processes. Due to tab isolation for
security and privacy, each tab gets a process. Each extension you
installed into the web browser gets its own isolated process. Without
knowing what extensions you installed, and how many tabs you opened, no
way to know if what you see is normal or high for process count. Also,
some web browsers (e.g., MS Edge-C) let you configure it for fast
loading which means some processes for it (about 4) remain loaded all
the time.

In Firefox, you can reduce the process count by changing its performance settings. Options > General - Performance, uncheck Recommended. Used
to be when that was deselected, you got to decide how many maximum
concurrent processes (for the web browser only) got loaded, but not now.
Use to be you could choose 1 to 8 content processes with a default of 4,
but Mozilla yanked that away from us all-too-stupid users. Now there is
just the GPU hardware acceleration option you can enable or disable
(sometimes have to disable if the web browser crashes because how it
works isn't compatible with the video driver). The "Learn more" link
points to:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/performance-settings

which doesn't provide any information on where the old settings
disappeared to inside of about:config, or if Mozilla took them away
completely.

From a bit of online searching, someone mentioned the max content
process count can be set in about:config at:

dom.ipc.processCount

Mine is currently set to 8 which supposedly is the maximum. Back when
Mozilla gave us a choice, the default was 4. When I got a config
choice, I tried upping to 8, but didn't notice any performance gain, so
I went back to the default of 4. Later Mozilla upped the default to 8,
but I didn't experience a massive response or rendering speed gain. I
rarely have more than a dozen tabs concurrently open, and usually less.

Mozilla was late adding multi-process support. Google had added it in
Chrome for something like 4 years before. In Firefox, it was called Electrolysis, or e10s.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/multiprocess https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis

e10s was added back in Firefox 48 released on August 2, 2016. Ever
since then, someone asks why there are multiple processes for Firefox,
even when no tabs are open other than the first one which could be for about:blank. Rather than use Windows' Task Manager to monitor Firefox processes, you can also use about:processes in Firefox.

I've never felt the need to use Opera (before or after support for
legacy XPCOM/XCOM extensions was dropped), or anything by Apple. You'll
have to do your own research on why they implement multi-processing. I
had Chrome a couple years ago, but don't remember how many processes it
loaded (with no tabs open other than to about:blank for Home page, and
no extensions installed). I suppose you could configure Firefox (less
likely Chrome) to use a single process, or 1 for the main browser, and 1
for each tab, and don't install any extensions, but likely rendering performance would suffer, especially if you open multiple tabs, and even
more especially if you load dynamic (scripted) web pages that want to
keep updating themselves.

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On 2024-12-22 21:01, Frank Slootweg wrote:

Ed Cryer <ed@somewhere.in.the.uk> wrote:

I'm quite used to seeing Firefox and all its iterations in Task Manager.
But today I loaded a couple of other browsers, purely out of interest.
Firefox had 12 iterations.
Opera had 18.
Safari had 2.

What the dickens goes on there? Why, wherefore and for what reason.

Normally there is one process (your 'iteration') per tab and sometimes some extra processes for seperate tasks (for example Edge has Crashpad,
GPU process and three Utility: ... processes).

No, firefox doesn't have a process per tab or per window. It has a max
number related to the number of processors.

--
Cheers, Carlos.

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On Mon, 12/23/2024 7:34 AM, Carlos E.R. wrote:

On 2024-12-22 21:01, Frank Slootweg wrote:

Ed Cryer <ed@somewhere.in.the.uk> wrote:

I'm quite used to seeing Firefox and all its iterations in Task Manager. >>> But today I loaded a couple of other browsers, purely out of interest.
Firefox had 12 iterations.
Opera had 18.
Safari had 2.

What the dickens goes on there? Why, wherefore and for what reason.

�� Normally there is one process (your 'iteration') per tab and sometimes
some extra processes for seperate tasks (for example Edge has Crashpad,
GPU process and three Utility: ... processes).

No, firefox doesn't have a process per tab or per window. It has a max number related to the number of processors.

Doesn't it create a new process, for the next group of tabs ?
Some ratio of tabs to content processes.

Paul

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On Sun, 22 Dec 2024 19:12:04 +0000, Ed Cryer wrote:

I'm quite used to seeing Firefox and all its iterations in Task Manager.
But today I loaded a couple of other browsers, purely out of interest. Firefox had 12 iterations.
Opera had 18.
Safari had 2.

All the big browsers run multiple processes, and have done so for many years. Firefox has been running multiple processes since version 54.

Firefox: <https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/06/firefox-multiple-content-processes/>

Chrome: <https://www.howtogeek.com/124218/why-does-chrome-have-so-many-open-processes/>

MS-Edge: <https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/why-do-i-have-so-many-copies-of-edge-running-at/3003e447-45dc-463e-8b25-6d204a4aadb4>

Safari: <https://betanews.com/2010/04/09/the-big-change-coming-to-safari-5-kernel-level-multi-processing/>

What the dickens goes on there? Why, wherefore and for what reason.

Why: <https://news.softpedia.com/news/Multi-Processes-in-Browsers-Chrome-Internet-Explorer-Firefox-and-WebKit-140535.shtml>
<https://helgeklein.com/blog/2019/01/modern-multi-process-browser-architecture/>



--
Kind regards
Ralph Fox
🦊️

Where coyn's not common, commons must be scant.

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On 2024-12-23 18:46, Paul wrote:

On Mon, 12/23/2024 7:34 AM, Carlos E.R. wrote:

On 2024-12-22 21:01, Frank Slootweg wrote:

Ed Cryer <ed@somewhere.in.the.uk> wrote:

I'm quite used to seeing Firefox and all its iterations in Task Manager. >>>> But today I loaded a couple of other browsers, purely out of interest. >>>> Firefox had 12 iterations.
Opera had 18.
Safari had 2.

What the dickens goes on there? Why, wherefore and for what reason.

�� Normally there is one process (your 'iteration') per tab and sometimes >>> some extra processes for seperate tasks (for example Edge has Crashpad,
GPU process and three Utility: ... processes).

No, firefox doesn't have a process per tab or per window. It has a max number related to the number of processors.

Doesn't it create a new process, for the next group of tabs ?
Some ratio of tabs to content processes.

I don't know. Maybe what I know is obsolete. I just looked and I have 95 processes and the parent (in Linux). Things have changed, the previous
time I looked at this I had just 8.

--
Cheers, Carlos.

--- MBSE BBS v1.0.8.4 (Linux-x86_64)
* Origin: ---:- FTN<->UseNet Gate -:--- (3:633/280.2@fidonet)

On Mon, 12/23/2024 4:43 PM, Carlos E.R. wrote:

On 2024-12-23 18:46, Paul wrote:

On Mon, 12/23/2024 7:34 AM, Carlos E.R. wrote:

On 2024-12-22 21:01, Frank Slootweg wrote:

Ed Cryer <ed@somewhere.in.the.uk> wrote:

I'm quite used to seeing Firefox and all its iterations in Task Manager. >>>>> But today I loaded a couple of other browsers, purely out of interest. >>>>> Firefox had 12 iterations.
Opera had 18.
Safari had 2.

What the dickens goes on there? Why, wherefore and for what reason.

��� Normally there is one process (your 'iteration') per tab and sometimes >>>> some extra processes for seperate tasks (for example Edge has Crashpad, >>>> GPU process and three Utility: ... processes).

No, firefox doesn't have a process per tab or per window. It has a max number related to the number of processors.

Doesn't it create a new process, for the next group of tabs ?
Some ratio of tabs to content processes.

I don't know. Maybe what I know is obsolete. I just looked and I have 95 processes and the parent (in Linux). Things have changed, the previous time I looked at this I had just 8.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/performance-settings

https://assets-prod.sumo.prod.webservices.mozgcp.net/media/uploads/gallery/images/2021-12-07-05-27-43-72c169.png

The design may have changed since that picture was taken, but
you can see at least at one time, there was a user adjustment possible.
And the value may also be visible in the Configuration Editor.
Changing that setting has to be stored somewhere, and the
Configuration Editor should have it.

Paul

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On Tue, 12/24/2024 1:20 AM, Paul wrote:

On Mon, 12/23/2024 4:43 PM, Carlos E.R. wrote:

On 2024-12-23 18:46, Paul wrote:

On Mon, 12/23/2024 7:34 AM, Carlos E.R. wrote:

On 2024-12-22 21:01, Frank Slootweg wrote:

Ed Cryer <ed@somewhere.in.the.uk> wrote:

I'm quite used to seeing Firefox and all its iterations in Task Manager. >>>>>> But today I loaded a couple of other browsers, purely out of interest. >>>>>> Firefox had 12 iterations.
Opera had 18.
Safari had 2.

What the dickens goes on there? Why, wherefore and for what reason. >>>>>

��� Normally there is one process (your 'iteration') per tab and sometimes
some extra processes for seperate tasks (for example Edge has Crashpad, >>>>> GPU process and three Utility: ... processes).

No, firefox doesn't have a process per tab or per window. It has a max number related to the number of processors.

Doesn't it create a new process, for the next group of tabs ?
Some ratio of tabs to content processes.

I don't know. Maybe what I know is obsolete. I just looked and I have 95 processes and the parent (in Linux). Things have changed, the previous time I looked at this I had just 8.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/performance-settings

https://assets-prod.sumo.prod.webservices.mozgcp.net/media/uploads/gallery/images/2021-12-07-05-27-43-72c169.png

The design may have changed since that picture was taken, but
you can see at least at one time, there was a user adjustment possible.
And the value may also be visible in the Configuration Editor.
Changing that setting has to be stored somewhere, and the
Configuration Editor should have it.

Paul

dom.ipc.processCount in about:config has a number of settings
for the process behavior.

dom.ipc.processCount 8 # This is likely tabs per process...

dom.ipc.processCount.webIsolated 4 $ But what is this one ? Might not be movies.

Paul


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