Slashdot Mirror
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.
This is cool. Competition is good.
The clowns working on Firefox had years, YEARS, to get their act together and rewrite the STINKING PILE OF SHIT that is the Firefox codebase. But they chose to flame anyone who dared talk about the massive architectural problem in the absurdly outdated Firefox process model.
Memory protection for each tab? Not possible! Stop asking for something that can't be done! They cried!
Threading for Javascript? Not possible! Stop asking for something that can't be done! The Firefox devs cried!
That is why those AC posts from Firefox devs were so vicious and venomous for everyone pointing out the massive memory/resource leaks in Firefox that have only been somewhat lessened in the latest versions. The solution for those problems involves a complete rewrite of the process and memory model for Firefox.
Now Google came out and humiliated the Firefox devs with Chrome and its amazing realworld threaded Javascript and memory and process protection/isolation.
Nothing but pity and absolutely no sympathy for anyone faced with retrofitting Firefox into a semblance of a modern browser architecture.
Now with full extension support in Chrome this is like hearing about Microsoft scrambling to fix their massive security problems in IE long after you dumped it.
For users with anything pre-multi-core (and that's only a few years old), this will result in things getting *slower* because of the process overhead. I hope it senses resources and optimizes appropriately, or all of the friends and relatives I tech-support will be cursing me when the update happens. Some of them are already ticked that when they double-click on the Firefox icon, it takes longer to load than IE because of all the update-phone-home (the sort of thing for which we would all get annoyed at M$).
Eventually we'll get to the point where the window comes up and it takes a ludicrous time to fill . . . just like Windows already does now.
Better philosophical architecture is a good thing. Running well in the practical typical system, in front of the average user, is good too. Disruptive change is not always the way to please your users.
I'll bite. It's about time.
Even explorer.exe is able to open directories using different processes, if you want. Frankly, I found it frightfully annoying to have X+ tabs open and have ONE of those tabs cause the entire program to crash, usually due to a plugin issue. Made no sense to me. Multi-process/multi-threaded/multi-whatever programming has been around for quite a while now, and multi-core cpus have been pretty common, too.
It's one of the huge advantages that I saw with Chrome (over Firefox). That and program open/new tab open speed. FF 3.5 seems to have addressed this somewhat, but it's still slower, I think.
Hooray for competition, and hooray for finally taking advantage of the hardware out there. Really, for one of the most used applications someone will use, it seems silly to only allow it to use a single-process model.
If that's the case, then you were doing something wrong. Firefox rarely uses more than 300mb of memory on my machine and tends not to crash either definitely not 2 to 3 times a day. Also, if you're only using it for 2 or 3 minutes a day, you're clearly doing something specifically to make it crash, because I've had this window open for multiples of that time right now and it has yet to crash
It's become common place for people to blame Firefox for things like Flash crashing or the gunk that comes from browsing. I've been browsing for some time with noscript and without flash and I rarely end up with this kind of trouble. On top of that I have the cache, cookies and history cleared upon exit. And I'm not having any sort of trouble of the sort you're describing.
I don't mind people criticizing Firefox, but this immature trolling because of your own incompetence is enough to make one slightly annoyed.
This is a pretty ungenerous view to take. First off, the Mozilla community is not confined to geeks on Slashdot who care passionately about things like process separation. The Firefox developer community most certainly does care about its users, but the users don't necessarily know that they want, much less could benefit from, process separation. Like Henry Ford said, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." So, Firefox developers delivered what the mass base of users wanted. If anything, you might fault them for being overly user-driven. We can see this in their focus on adding new features, instead of leaving the trivial features as extensions and focusing on performance, standards implementation, and technical features like process separation.
The Rise and Fall of Online Community
The Firefox developer community cares a lot for its users ... compared to the Thunderbird developer community.
Red to red, black to black. Switch it on, but stand well back.
OK I'm a user, and I want a browser where the UI doesn't lag when pages are loading. I also want a browser that doesn't completely freeze when a Java applet launches or PDF file opens. I would also like a browser where I don't have to restart the whole thing when Flash gets borked and refuses to play youtube videos.
Point being there's a lot of user-visible issues and longstanding complaints which are addressed by this. Furthermore, the incumbent browser (IE) doesn't have any of these issues.
(And "Use Adblock and stop using Java/Flash/PDF" is a workaround, not a real solution.)
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
> First off, the Mozilla community is not confined to geeks on Slashdot who care passionately about things like process separation. The Firefox developer community most certainly does care about its users, but the users don't necessarily know that they want, much less could benefit from, process separation.
That's the same group of developers who wilfully ignore repeated ordinary user requests to give them an option to accept duplicate certificates, even after some big red security warning. To make things worse, it doesn't even bother to display which certificate and which CA are in violation so the user can delete them. On IE, you can click "Continue anyway" to bypass the self-issued certificate duplication and log on to your router, for example.
Their response: it's the fault of your router company.
This is ridiculous. The Mozilla devs definitely think they know better than the users.
I'm really surprised that Microsoft hasn't advertised such a major technological advantage over Firefox in any of their advertising media.
Have they ever advertised against Firefox? I'd be surprised if they did. To compare oneself to a rival is to legitimize that rival.
Learn to love Alaska
A lot of people questioned this at the time, but the response was "That's the way Netscape Communicator 4 does it and everyone loves Netscape 4".
I've heard a lot of words used with Netscape 4. I can confidently say "loved" was never one of them.