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In IE8 and Chrome, Processes Are the New Threads
SenFo writes "To many of the people who downloaded Google Chrome last week, it was a surprise to observe that each opened tab runs in a separate process rather than a separate thread. Scott Hanselman, Lead Program Manager at Microsoft, discusses some of the benefits of running in separate processes as opposed to separate threads. A quote: 'Ah! But they're slow! They're slow to start up, and they are slow to communicate between, right? Well, kind of, not really anymore.'"
...whaaaaaaaat? Microsoft and Apple have moved *away* from X11 window systems. Because they completely fucking suck for desktop use. To get any reasonable desktop performance out of X, you have to replace about half of the server infrastructure (and anyone who thinks the way X.org is designed is *good* should please stop using computers).
People are not moving back to the processes-are-better view, either. In *this* case, processes have some benefits because they provide a greater amount of firewalling in case of crashes, because stability is the primary concern of a web browser these days (we've achieved good-enough performance). Threads are still better for the majority of computing tasks, if only due to shared address space (because IPC sucks to write and debug).
Get off the crack pipe.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Apple *had* an X server implementation when they started futzing with NeXT. They *fled* from using it as the core of their desktop, and for good reason.
And no, douchebag, I don't consider "server infrastructure" to be file browsers or window managers. Trying to write a performant graphics driver for X.org (which is the only X server that really matters, in a desktop context; Xming for Windows, as you alluded to, can't do most of what a modern desktop should be able to, though it's useful for a few tasks) requires you to rip out the lower third of the fucking server and wedge in custom code for it. Linux Hater Blog has an excellent explanation, for the people who don't know what they're talking about (that'd be you, champ): http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/2008/06/nitty-gritty-shit-on-open-source.html
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."