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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).
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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Other browsers have already caught up to Firefox in speed, features, and standards support.
Many mainstream browsers are speedy, or at least speedy enough, but Firefox does offer a unique mix of features:
Ogg Theora/Vorbis: Currently supported by Firefox, Chrome, Opera
FOSS: Firefox, Chrome (just Chromium?)
Cross-Platform on Win, Mac, GNU/Linux: Firefox, Chrome (maybe just beta?), Opera
For me, both Firefox and Chrom{e|ium} look like good contenders. I've had good experiences with Mozilla products for quite some time, so I'll probably continue with Firefox.
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And really, Chrome is -the- browser to beat right now. If it had a more stable Linux version and had all the addons/themes along with the ability to customize absolutely everything, chances are most Linux distros would ship with it over Firefox.
Yeah, Firefox and Chrome may be the only two competitors with some features, but compared to others, Firefox just can't compete. Things like supporting multi-threading, tab isolation, plugin isolation, JavaScript execution speed, and general UI responsiveness are all things that Firefox really lacks. Right now, the ability to customize and the fact that its available in Ubuntu without needing extra repos, are about the only things that are keeping me from using Chrome full time.
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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!).