Saturday, September 3, 2016

E10S and Me

With the recent flurry of announcements about Firefox and Electrolysis (E10S), I decided to see if my primary computer was ready. The short answer is no. The longer answer is that Mozilla still has a ways to go making this a user-friendly switch. First, you have to know to go to about:support and find the Multiprocess entry. Then, if you're like me, you may discover the flag is set to 0 because of incompatible Addons. From there you must compare your list of addons to the Are we e10s yet? page. If Firefox is smart enough to know that Addons are blocking my migration, why can't it just tell me which ones? About:addons could have a banner at the top that says "Hey, you have a choice to make." For me, the main blocker is NoScript. I don't think I could survive websurfing without NoScript, both from a security standpoint and from an annoyance standpoint. 5 of the Top 10 addons list their compatibility as Unknown. As much effort as Mozilla has poured into their browser, I would have expected them to get the Addons ready by donating time/money. Marketshare is unacceptably low, and this is key to getting power users to continue recommending Firefox to people.