So what was the reason for breaking compatibility in FF57?

[bbbl67]

So wondering what the advantage of the new incompatible FF is supposed to be? Memory usage seems to be still pretty much the same as before, so that wasn't fixed. Were the old add-ons and extensions creating crashes and slowdowns on the old FF, that required a fresh new start, killing off the installed base of useful add-ons? Trying to wrap my head around what the possible advantage might be that was addressed with breaking compatibility?

[malliz]

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/11/enter ... et-faster/
One reason
Do your own search

[allande]

This post is the best explanation of why Firefox had to change: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/commen ... e/dpyam66/

The old extensions made multiprocess impossible. Using only one out of as many as 8 cores on a new computer is pretty unacceptable. They also made sandboxing very difficult, the first part of which has already landed and more is coming.
From the Firefox 57 release notes: "The content process now has a stricter security sandbox that blocks filesystem reading and writing on Linux, similar to the protections for Windows and macOS that shipped in Firefox 56" https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/5 ... easenotes/
And, without having to keep the old extension compatibility it opens up the possibility of things like - if you read the nightly build threads there is lots of talk about webrender - using the video card to process the code for webpages.

[ianas]

I'd say mulch-threading Google had it for ages Firefox was a single threaded application and with most processors having 4 or more cores mulch-threading was a must especially on android as arm devices have low powered cores and a single thread is extremely degrading especially if you have 8 or more cores if I'm not mistaken Samsung did some of the development especially for android devices
multi core PC users should also see a boost in performance, people on old machines using 1 or 2 core cpu's will probably get a performance degradation but seeing how Mozilla dropped non-SSE2 CPU support I don't think old machines are high on their priority

[the-edmeister]

I'd say mulch-threading Google had it for ages Firefox was a single threaded application ...

Google Chrome came about when PC's / laptops were getting duo core processors. The base of Firefox was developed by Netscape in 1995 before the Pentium processors were available; like during the Intel 486 era.Mozilla hung onto Gecko as long as possible and maybe too long.

Like Google came 11 to 12 years after Gecko was being used by Netscape.

[therube]

what the advantage

None.
A neutered dog can no longer procreate. The species will die.

Extensions are certainly neutered.