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Testing a Pre-Release, Parallel Firefox
Firefox, in its official version, still lacks support for multi-threading (running on different processors), though Chrome and Internet Explorer 8 both have this feature. A Firefox project called Electrolysis is underway to close this gap. A blog author tested a pre-release version of Firefox that loads different tabs in parallel, and he chronicles his findings, including a huge speedup in Javascript vs. Firefox version 3.5 (though the pre-release still lags Chrome in many of the tests).
This is a good thing. Firefox desperately needs to modernize. About the only killer feature left in Firefox is customization. Other browsers have already caught up to Firefox in speed, features, and standards support.
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Multithreading still relies on a single point of failure - the shared memory space.
By doing what Chrome did, and breaking each tab instance into its own process, any single tab can crash/hang without affecting any other page.
I know when I load an MPG video that it sometimes hangs the browser, and I can't do anything (close/minimize/switch away) while the media player is being loaded. This sometimes causes me stress.
Firefox does support multithreading, what it doesn't support is multiprocessing. Firefox runs as a single process, whereas Chrome has a separate process for every site, plugin and extension.
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Process-per-tab shouldn't speed up Javascript unless you're doing something else in a second tab that's hogging CPU. Most likely the Javascript performance gains came simply from the fact that he was using a 3.7 branch of the code. Which is kind of sad, considering bleeding-edge Firefox still lags behind Chrome by a considerable margin.
The writer's mistake is more basic than just conflating threads and processes. You left out the parenthesis:
still lacks support for multi-threading (running on different processors)
Which not only conflates cores and processors, but also suggests that multithreading isn't useful if you don't have multiple cores/processors.
When I was writing the concurrency chapter in the Java Tutorial, the experts would give me a very hard time if I allowed even a vague suggestion that this was true. The fact is, threads are extremely useful even if you only have one core to work with. For example, any well-written GUI program will not handle user interaction in the same thread with other functions; if it did, the GUI would freeze every time the program were waiting on something.
Multithreading is a big topic these days because everybody wants to maximize their utilization of all these n-core processors. But it's not a new topic.
This mistake seems to be very common. Which leaves me confused as to what's new here. It's not parallel downloading of files — Mozilla/Firefox has always done that. A more robust parallelism mechanism? Or maybe they're copying Chrome and giving each tab its own process (not thread!).