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.

Comments

Humiliated By Google's Chrome

[Anonymous Coward]

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 But they chose to flame anyone who dared talk about the massive architectural problem in the absurdly outdated Firefox process model.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.

Re:Humiliated By Google's Chrome

[suso]

Hey chill, give em a break. There is something to be said for filtering out every little feature request that gets sent your way. Good filters are how great software stays great (like Linux) and makes sure that the project doesn't veer in the wrong direction. I don't know much about the Firefox developers, but I'd say they have good reason to be filters for a lot of things.

As a sysadmin, I deal all the time with users asking for the latest features, but I have to weigh which ones can be done now, which ones have to wait and which ones shouldn't be done because they are stupid. I try to keep an open mind, but sometimes you get stuck in a rut because of old information or "the way things used to work", so you just have to be patient, try to show the new way and hope that it sinks in.

Re:Humiliated By Google's Chrome

[Blakey Rat]

They're not doing it because Chrome has it, they're doing it because IE8 has it. Microsoft putting this in Internet Explorer before Firefox is basically equivalent to kicking Firefox developers in the nuts.

The "About Time" Bandwagon

[CannonballHead]

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.

Re:About time

[anaesthetica]

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.

Re:About time

[IntlHarvester]

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.)

Re:About time

[Wolfier]

> 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.