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Firefox To Get Multi-Process Browsing
An anonymous reader writes with news that multi-process browsing will be coming to Firefox. The project is called Electrolysis, and the developers "have already assembled a prototype that renders a page in a separate process from the interface shell in which it is displayed." Mozilla's Benjamin Smedberg says they're currently "[sprinting] as fast as possible to get basic code working, running simple testcase plugins and content tabs in a separate process," after which they'll fix everything that breaks in the process. Further details of their plan are available on the Mozilla wiki, and a summary is up at TechFragments.
What took so long?
Yeah! All they had to do was change their entire codebase from around 5+ years of Firefox (and probably more of Mozilla/Netscape) to update it! That's, what, half an hour's work? And don't give me this "legacy code" bullshit; if they bothered to anticipate our fifty bajillion core processors back then like any NORMAL person should today, they wouldn't be in this mess!
Lazy bastards. I mean, how hard is it to change what is apparently that one really trivial-to-find call in their code to useProcessSeparationOhAndIAlsoWantAPony(true)? Took them long enough...
Really. And all this wouldn't even be a problem if they just wrote it in Java to begin with.
This is why we can't have nice things.
It was probably too large a project to consider doing without a pressing need.
Cuz yeah, Flash locking up the entire browser wasn't a pressing need until IE8 and Chrome. Riiiight.
LOTS of us have been asking about this for a VERY long time (years). Leaving it this late is called 'lack of vision'. This should've been in the very first version. Now there IS a ton of code to make this work with. I imagine that's why they call this Electrolysis...it's a hairy problem now that it's been ignored for so long.