WebKit2 API Layer Brings Split-Process Model

99BottlesOfBeerInMyF writes "Anders Carlsson and Sam Weinig over at Apple just announced WebKit2, a rework of the WebKit engine that powers Chrome and Safari. This new version of WebKit incorporates the same style of split-process model that provides stability in Chrome, but built directly into the framework so all browsers based upon WebKit will be able to gain the same level of sandboxing and stability. AppleInsider has a writeup, and the team has provided 'high level documentation' as well. Both Palm and the Epiphany team are going to be happy about this."

Comments

Re:Yay! Sandboxes!

[rawler]

Still, whenever a Tab hangs in my Chromium, usually most, or all other tab dies as well, occasionally entire chromium.

Re:Is there a sandbox for sandbox?

[TheRaven64]

So, is there a way to run all of those processes inside a one big process?

Not on most operating systems, no. This is a major flaw (I actually gave a talk about this and proposed a language extension that takes advantage of it a couple of weeks ago) in most modern systems. It's particularly embarrassing because several mainframe operating systems did support this idea back in the early '70s.

The browser should not be doing this, it should be the job of the OS. Operating systems have a much better track record of isolating processes from each other. A process should be able to create subprocesses that have a subset of the capabilities of the parent and can not interact with the system without going via the parent. The isolation could then be trivially enforced by the MMU, without requiring (slow, complex, buggy, insecure) software implementations.

Re:Is there a sandbox for sandbox?

[c_forq]

On the other hand I think Steve Jobs made a great point about this at the iPhone OS 4 event. If your end user has to use some sort of process management you have failed. The more I have thought about it the more I agree, only coders and debuggers should have to deal with process management. If I'm not working on the project I don't care about processes, and unless your program is screwing up my system I don't care about processes.