Eric Rahm, a Mozilla engineer, writes about Firefox memory usage, multi-process (e10s) architecture, and browser memory comparisons.
HN commenters cite his measurements as data in Firefox memory debates, including e10s overhead versus Chrome and real-website comparisons.
> "Would you mind linking to some of those blogposts."
A quick parsing of https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis yields "Memory Usage of Firefox with e10s Enabled" [1] and its followup "Are they slim yet?" [2], with [1] closing with these words:
"Simply put: the more content processes we use, the more memory we use. On the plus side it’s not a 1:1 factor, with 8 content processes we see roughly a doubling of memory usage on the TabsOpenSettled measurement. It’s a bit worse on Windows, a bit better on OSX, but it’s not 8 times worse. Overall we see a 10-20% increase in memory usage for the 1 content process case (which is what we plan on shipping initially). This seems like a fair tradeoff for potential security and performance benefits, but as we try to grow the number of content processes we’ll need to take another look at where that memory is being used."
Some comments at https://billmccloskey.wordpress.com/2013/12/05/multiprocess-firefox/ also hint at pre-existing discussion on the one-process-per-tab subject, but sadly without linking to it. You'd probably followup with a mailing lists search.
[1] http://www.erahm.org/2016/02/11/memory-usage-of-firefox-with-e10s-enabled/
[2] http://www.erahm.org/2016/02/12/are-they-slim-yet/
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As for "What's the best way for a non-contributor to follow Firefox development?", I follow https://planet.mozilla.org/ , and if that's too much of a firehose to your taste, maybe try https://hacks.mozilla.org/
Memory usage is closely being watched as part of the 10s transition. Of course, e10s is not a free lunch, but according to early claims [1] it's 20% more than non-e10s Firefox and half the usage of Chrome's multi-process implementation.
[1]: http://www.erahm.org/2016/02/12/are-they-slim-yet/
Here's a blog post from this week about memory usage: http://www.erahm.org/2017/09/25/firefox-memory-usage-in-the-quantum-era/
That's a comparison on real websites rather than browser benchmarks.
We're pretty consistently seeing Edge use fewer resources than Chrome, though there might be measurement challenges. Here's one recent benchmark: http://www.erahm.org/2016/02/12/are-they-slim-yet/
There are interesting data and comparisons without E10S on https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/Release_Criteria and http://www.erahm.org/2016/02/11/memory-usage-of-firefox-with-e10s-enabled/
http://www.erahm.org/2019/03/13/doubling-the-number-of-content-processes-in-firefox/