How to enable Electrolysis in Firefox

tkzv · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 22 Aug 2014 Posts: 83

I've been hearing about the experimental process separation in Firefox (also known as electrolysis, e10s or multi-process) for years. How do I enable it? The manual says to enable the checkbox "Enable multi-process", but it is absent. Is the option accessible from about:config?

www-client/firefox-43.0, AMD64.
USE="custom-optimization dbus egl hardened hwaccel jemalloc3 jit minimal system-cairo system-icu system-jpeg system-libvpx system-sqlite -bindist -custom-cflags -debug -gmp-autoupdate -gstreamer -gstreamer-0 -gtk3 -neon -pgo -pulseaudio -selinux -startup-notification -test -wifi"

Do I need to set some USE flags? Or do I need a different ebuild?

Syl20 · l33t Joined: 04 Aug 2005 Posts: 619 Location: France

If I understood the related web pages I found, Electrolysis should be available on v46+ versions. You have to use the nightly builds or the developper edition to get this feature now.

tkzv · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 22 Aug 2014 Posts: 83

Can it be enabled from the normal ebuild? There was something about "bindist" flag enabling/disabling the developer version. Or where should I get the developer ebuild?

Syl20 · l33t Joined: 04 Aug 2005 Posts: 619 Location: France

There's no related code in the current stable version, so you can't enable it.

Developer edititon (formerly Aurora) is specific : https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/

I didn't find any sufficiently recent ebuild available.

tkzv · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 22 Aug 2014 Posts: 83

Can you say anything good or bad about "necromancy-overlay" (available in Layman)?

UPDATE: 44.0_alpha2 is considered outdated (and keeps nagging to update). It's a binary, with all drawbacks. The manifest was wrong and had to be recreated, the ebuild refused to work until I added EAPI=4 to it. So far, Firefox has been working without crashes longer than "stable" 43.0 from the main tree ever did this week (both source and binary). But interface font settings reverted to defaults (ignoring profile CSS settings) which are very straining to my eyes.

UPDATE 2: Shift-Numpad Ins now works for pasting again (was broken since about version 26). Flash doesn't work.

UPDATE 3: http://radikal.ru/big/bf092915ccc04d949f7289f7ab4f60ff causes the browser in the old profiles to stop responding. Not reproduced in the developer profile.