OpenBSD The many ways of running firefox on OpenBSD

[e1-531g]

http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=artic...20170425173917

Maybe i haven't talked about it enough on the lists, but since i've been maintaining the various mozillas in the portstree (cvs log says i started around firefox 3.6.something... 7 years ago. *sigh*) a lot of things changed, so i wanted take the 6.1 release as an occasion to sum up the various ways one could run which version of which firefox on which version of OpenBSD.

First, and this has been the case for a few years already, these days I only target amd64 and i386. It's been "fun" for a while but now it's impossible to keep up with macppc and sparc64, although Martin Husemann from NetBSD still manages to run recent firefox on sparc64, i gave up on this - even *running* firefox on an i386 netbook with 1Gb of memory is unbearable. Sad state of affairs.. and on top of this, the recent dependency on rust also limits the amount of platforms firefox could run on, since rust only works on amd64 and i386 for now (thanks to the insane amount of work by semarie@ !).

[beiroot]

even *running* firefox on an i386 netbook with 1Gb of memory is unbearable

I can confirm that. Sadly.
Tested on my toshiba nb305 netbook with 1GB ram. Added 1 GB more and still it's unbearable.

[beiroot]

ok, so how do I smoothly run a youtube video on my openbsd?

[Head_on_a_Stick]

Originally Posted by beiroot

ok, so how do I smoothly run a youtube video on my openbsd?

Have you increased the ulimit for firefox yet?

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=149338191601850&w=2

I use this (my normal user is in the staff group):

staff:\
        :datasize-cur=3072M:\
        :datasize-max=infinity:\
        :maxproc-max=512:\
        :maxproc-cur=256:\
        :ignorenologin:\
        :requirehome@:\
        :tc=default:

FWIW, YouTube videos have always ran well for me under OpenBSD in both FF & Chromium but I needed to raise the ulimit to stop FF dumping it's (huge) core.

[e1-531g]

Before FF could stream videos from YT, I was using Chromium, but I don't know how many RAM does Chromium wants.
One also can use ./www/youtube-dl package to download and then play using ./multimedia/mpv.
You can also experiment with SMTube, SMPlayer.

[e1-531g]

Actually mpv could use youtube-dl internally to download video. Some examples with the same video, but different resolution and framerate:

#720p@30fps
mpv --ytdl-raw-options=format=22  ytdl://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_W2w0oBwb8
#720p@60fps
mpv --ytdl-raw-options=format=298+140 ytdl://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_W2w0oBwb8
#1080p@60fps
mpv --ytdl-raw-options=format=299+140 ytdl://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_W2w0oBwb8

[beiroot]

I increased the u limit for Firefox, but it's still soooo slow.
On my Toshiba NB305 with 1,6GHz and 2GB RAM it's making my CPU work hard at 100% and ~60C... It uses around 320MB RAM. I mean seriously... 1,6GHz + 2 GB is not that little.

The same thing happens with Chrome, although it seems just a little lighter.

Is there a way for me to watch a YT video like a decent human being?
Downloading and watching via ytdl is a poor option since while looking for something I often browse through YT and I sometimes listen to music via yt playlists.

And guys, come on...to be honest, using youtube by downloading via youtube downloader and watching on mpv is like watching porn on vhs when each time you have to go to the video rental shop

[jggimi]

Time to select a different workstation, or swap CPUs to something that can use more than 2GB RAM. Youtube and modern browsers really require more than 2GB, which is the maximum for your Atom N450.

I have no trouble with Youtube / Firefox on a Thinkpad X220 (Core i5 Duo) with 4GB RAM.

[blackhole]

You're expecting a little too much from an around seven years old, single core 1.6GHz Atom CPU. I have a similar spec netbook at home, it sees little use these days.

[beiroot]

I was worried your gonna say this...but its battery though, amazing. 7 years and still full capacity!!!
So, anyone wants to buy a really cool Toshiba NB305?
Or sell a decent ThinkPad?

[jggimi]

I purchased my X220 used. But I have a correction. It has 8GB of RAM, not 4GB.

[Carpetsmoker]

It's a fact of life that Firefox is simply slow, full stop. Even on my relatively new Linux i5-6400 machine with 8GB RAM the performance difference between Firefox and Chromium is quite large.

It's workable ... most of the time. Although some web applications are literally unusable. The development tools are also so slow that it's semi-useless.

There's this old joke, "computer have become a thousand times faster in the last 30 years but the time it takes to start your word processor is the time". When it comes to "the web" matters seem to be even worse :-(

[IdOp]

Yeah, the application side keeps asking the hardware to do more, because it can.

[ocicat]

Originally Posted by IdOp

Yeah, the application side keeps asking the hardware to do more, because it can.

Stated another way, applications are developed to run developers' machines. As long as users are using similar hardware configurations, applications should run as experienced (& expected) by developers.

[Carpetsmoker]

That's certainly true, but I think that's just part of the story. The other part is that the developer community is collectively suffering from a second system effect, resulting in some very smart people producing very poor software. This is especially the case for the web developer community in my observation.

[e1-531g]

Originally Posted by beiroot

I increased the u limit for Firefox, but it's still soooo slow.
I mean seriously... 1,6GHz + 2 GB is not that little.

When it comes to processors frequency is not everything. Your Atom has different microarchitecture than mainstream series of Intel processors. It was designed to be cheaper, smaller and energy-saving rather than focused on performance.
Somewhere between 5.9 and 6.0 release there were improvements to OpenBSD which resulted in Youtube working on most recent laptops and mine is included. I have two core Sandy Bridge-based 2,2GHz Pentium-class processor underclocked to 1,3Ghz and I can watch Youtube in Firefox. Switching between videos is rather slow, but when video starts playing I can watch it.
I have also 6GB DDR3 RAM@1333 MHZ though.

Originally Posted by Carpetsmoker

It's a fact of life that Firefox is simply slow, full stop. Even on my relatively new Linux i5-6400 machine with 8GB RAM the performance difference between Firefox and Chromium is quite large.

Maybe it's due to extensions installed in yours Firefox? In my experience they slow down Firefox a lot.

Firefox running on OpenBSD is slow, so I use Chromium most of the time. On the other side clean Firefox (without extensions, cache cleared from time to time) is running fine on my Windows system and it should be to running good on Gnu/Linux distros too.

[jb_daefo]

... firefox bug? ...
Not to interject off-topic, but here firefox, if one inputs a number, 3 for instance, into a text box, often one is put into a whole other TAB rendering web input useless. [ FreeBSD not openbsd... but ...]. Partially fixed by using 'three' instead of '3' ...

[beiroot]

ok, I know it's low-end and generally slow CPU, but comparing to Windows 7 or Lubuntu I tested on it, OpenBSD's firefox seemed the slowest. That's it, just an observation.
But you're right. I might be expecting too much, so I'll do a test on a really powerful machine as soon as I get my hands on one.

[Head_on_a_Stick]

This blog entry is a year old now and I'm sure that progress has been made since then but it discusses some of the issues in respect of FF performance in OpenBSD:

http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/firefox-vs-rthreads

I think it is important to recognise that the speed gains enjoyed by other operating systems will almost certainly inflict a cost in other areas.

Or to quote fortune(6):

Speed is subsittute fo accurancy.

[jb_daefo]

Originally Posted by jb_daefo

... firefox bug? ...
Not to interject off-topic, but here firefox, if one inputs a number, 3 for instance, into a text box, often one is put into a whole other TAB rendering web input useless. [ FreeBSD not openbsd... but ...]. Partially fixed by using 'three' instead of '3' ...

Found a firefox extension installed
'single key tab switch'
which I disabled, restarted firefox, 'solved'