Routinely killing bash...

[ylluminate]

Hey, so I've been experiencing an issue for quite a while with Epichrome where I can't start more instances of Epichrome apps (I try to fire it off and it just seemingly does nothing visibly) and other anomalies occur and it seems to require me to kill all instances of bash. Upon killing all bash processes I can then again start Epichrome apps.

Any thoughts on handling this more effectively?

(BTW, since I use zsh for normal shell work, killing all bash instances is not a problem for me, but it's obviously suboptimal.)

[ylluminate]

By the way, a quick thought, it might be worth switching to /bin/sh instead of bash since in Catalina dash is included and can be altered via sudo ln -sf /bin/dash /var/select/sh so that it's used by default instead of bash for script spawning. It could be a little lighter/more responsive than bash since it uses less than 1/2 of the memory bash uses generally it appears.

[dmarmor]

Hmm. Probably the best bet is going to be to wait till 2.4.0 is out and see if that helps. The running app architecture is significantly different (though still bash-based), so it may work better for you.

The Epichrome scripts actually all used to be under /bin/sh, but I'm using several bash-specific features, so I can't easily change it over to another shell at this point. The long-term plan is to get off of shell-scripts entirely, so I don't want to put significant engineering into the scripts at this point if I can help it.

Does this problem occur in a repeatable way? Like, is there some specific number of running Epichrome apps after which the problems start cropping up?

[ylluminate]

"Repeatable" is an interesting term here... While it ALWAYS repeats and is consistent, I cannot ascertain WHEN or WHY, which are of course critical in debugging. I've gotten to the point where I'm just killall'ing any bash process at a given interval to try to help preempt issues.

Yeah, would love to test 2.4.0-pres to see if it would help.

FYI, Waterfox has been doing considerably better in many regards compared to Chromium based browsers lately for JS apps/games and otherwise. It might be time to fork for an Epifox as well. Some preliminary testing shows it's possible and perhaps simpler than Chrom*.

[dmarmor]

I'm hopefully quite close to the official 2.4.0 release, so stay tuned for that!

Regarding Waterfox, I have checked in periodically on the possibility of doing a Firefox-based version of Epichrome, but every time I do, I run into basic showstopper problems, the main one being that it doesn't have a simple way to run with an app-style window. There are various ugly kludges possible using userChrome.css but even those don't work very well. I've concluded the only way to get the basic app-style feel would be to run everything through an extension, which would be a really big task I definitely don't have time for at the moment. So I'm afraid Epifox is not on the horizon anytime soon...

[ylluminate]

Re: Waterfox, I'd be curious so the showstopper(s) you found since manual creation and management seemed to function for me...

[dmarmor]

If you could point me to a way to launch Waterfox from the command-line with its own custom user profile directory, and launching the URL in an app-style window, then I would be thrilled!

[ylluminate]

This worked for me:

/Applications/Waterfox.app/Contents/MacOS/waterfox --profile ./test_user duckduckgo.com

/Applications/Waterfox.app/Contents/MacOS/waterfox --help gives you args...

[dmarmor]

That does create an instance with its own profile, but it doesn't create an app-style window. I still get tabs and an address bar, and haven't found a good way to get rid of those. I was excited about the --ssb option that was added recently, but it removes too much, including most menus.

I'll keep checking on the *fox world periodically, because I would love to have that as an option too.

[ylluminate]

Ah, I see your dilemma, I have not used Epichrome as an "app-style" (sans tabs and address bar) browser for years, so I guess that functionality slipped my mind. I use Epichrome purely as a topical browser instance controller now vs the original SSB concept.

I've had trouble submitting feedback for Firefox / *fox successfully over the years, do you know of a more direct way to reach anyone that may be receptive to input?

[dmarmor]

Gotcha. Yeah, for that use case, I'd probably be able to get it working reasonably easily. But a lot of users (myself included) rely on app-style uses too, so I wouldn't want to go to the effort of a port until I knew how to do that.

No, I haven't have any better luck getting attention from the *fox community. I actually recently found some forum posts complaining about the --ssb option and how it apparently was added as the start of something but then essentially abandoned and likely to be taken out again. They got no good response to their questions. So I'm not sure how to push for any progress there.

[ylluminate]

@dmarmor interesting that the Firefox support folks have told me that we should use https://chat.mozilla.org/ to talk with devs directly about the SSB situation. We might want to double team them there.