#7 Disables multi-processing windows (FF 50)

[Anonymous]

On Firefox 50, enabling the Recoll add-on disables "multi-processing windows" feature (about:support changing from "Multi-processing windows: 3/3" to "Multi-processing windows: 0/3 (disabled by add-ons)".
It could very well be a problem since FF 48, I only noticed that "Electrolysis" is disabled on my Linux Mint 18 because of another issue (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1318404)
After some digging I came across https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/Working_with_multiprocess_Firefox, not sure if it helps.
Thanks!

[Jean-Francois Dockes]

Are you sure that this is because of the recoll extension ? Because I have it installed on firefox 49, and about: support says multiprocess windows 4/4 (enabled by user)

In any case I was never able to get any help from mozilla with adapting this addon, could not find the right forums, the people on the listed irc channel just ignore me, so, until someone points me in the right direction, and I do get help, the plugin will not get full e10s support (it is working in mp mode with the "shims" at the moment).

[Anonymous]

I tested it by disabling/reenabling add-ons one-by-one. Two addons disable multi-processing windows on my setup: recoll extension and flashgot extension.
I reverted Firefox to version 49 (that I still had below /var/cache/apt/archives),
with no add-on enabled: "multi-processing windows: 2/2"
with only recoll add-on enabled: "multi-processing windows: 0/2 (disabled by add-ons)"
Setup: up-to-date Linux Mint 18 (Sarah) amd64, GeForce GTX 960 with proprietary nVidia drivers 367.57, I don't know what other information could be relevant...

What you're describing is quite depressing, I'm using several add-ons, which are one big reason to use Firefox. Let's hope Mozilla will realize that before e10s becomes mandatory and many more extensions authors and maintainers face migration pain :(

[Jean-Francois Dockes]

This is weird, I was updated to firefox 50 today, and still have:

Multiprocess Windows: 2/2 (Enabled by user)

I have version 2.2.1 of the extension. I suppose that you have the same ? Up to date from addons.mozilla.org

And yes, I was quite pissed off after my visit of the irc channel.

[Jean-Francois Dockes]

I also have browser.tabs.remote.force-enable set to true in the config. I don't quite remember what it does, but I think that it has something to do with e10s

[Anonymous]

Version 2.2.1 indeed
Ok, I tried adding "browser.tabs.remote.force-enable: true" to my settings (the key didn't exist before), restarted FF 49, and got a strange result (even if it must explain why we were getting different results):
now about:support multiprocessing windows shows "2/2 (Enabled by user)"
but when FF starts I get a dialog box saying "Fail to write content/metadata. Would you like to disable recoll now?" (OK/Cancel). If I select OK the extension stays enabled in FF, but "Automatically index pages (subject to rules below)" becomes unchecked; And if I try to manually index a page I get the same dialog box. I assume e10s is denying direct access to ~/.recollweb/ToIndex/ ?

[Jean-Francois Dockes]

Actually, there are a number of things which could fail below the above message, apart from file creation.

I just checked on an almost new Fedora 25 VM (no recoll work ever done on it), that installing recoll + the extension 'just worked'.

Then I had to set both browser.tabs.remote.autostart and browser.tabs.remote.force-enable to true to get multiprocessing windows to be non-zero, but then indexing still worked.

So I'm not sure why you get this error. What system are you running ?

[Anonymous]

On this system I'm using Linux Mint 18 ("Sarah") Cinnamon edition, which is a fork from Ubuntu Xenial
Up-to-date stable packages, and only a few 3rd party repositories for specific softwares (including ppa:recoll-backports/recoll-1.15-on for recoll 1.22.3-1~ppa1~xenial1)

[Jean-Francois Dockes]

Recoll is not involved at all in this. So this has to be the firefox version or environment. I'll try the same on Mint 18 (tomorrow, need to download/install etc.)

[Anonymous]

It gets weirder and weirder
I tried the exact same procedure you did in a Mint 18 VM (install recoll from PPA, install recoll extension, force-enabled multiprocessing windows ("1/1 (Enabled by user)")) and indexing worked fine
So I went back to my primary system, reinstalled FF 50, created a brand new user, and tried in this environment (configured recoll, installed recoll extension, force-enabled multiprocessing windows ("2/2 (Enabled by user)"), and indexing worked!
So last but not least I went back to my own account, checked that multiprocessing windows were force-enabled ("2/2 (Enabled by user)"), re-enabled page indexation in recoll extension and indexing works!
I'm a bit lost... The fact that FF50 now says 2/2 instead of 3/3 like it used to means that something got disabled somehow, but I have no idea what and how (transitioning again from FF49 to FF50?)
At this point I hope I'm not wasting your time...

[Jean-Francois Dockes]

No problem, but I wonder if you might have had the very old version of the addon somehow installed. This had a different id, so it's not totally impossible. Maybe it was messing things up and finally got booted at some point... Anyway, if things are now working all is well !

The future issue though, is that the current extension is still running with "compatibility shims" which are supposed to go away one day, and I don't know how to rewrite it in a fully conformant way, amd actually don't even know if it is possible.

[Jean-Francois Dockes]

WebExtension version of the add-on: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/recoll-we/