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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."
Don't let facts and history get in the way of your bias. Webkit was forked from KHTML by Apple in 2002 and named it Webkit. For a while KHTML developers backported Apple's features independently but have since worked closely with Apple incorporating Webkit features into KHTML. Apple released Webkit as open source in 2005. They are still active in maintaining and developing it. Specifically, some developers at Apple did the development and announced the changes on a dev forum:
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Did you ever use KHTML? It did a tiny fraction of what WebKit does, and most of the recent stuff (JavaScript implementation, all of the HTML5 support much of the CSS support) is from Apple. It's basically just the work of the KHTML devs in the same way that FreeBSD is basically just the work of those guys at UCB in the '80s.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Like GP said, WebKit is basically just the work of the KHTML devs. Apple leeched off of their work.
If by 'leeched' you mean they took an existing open project, modified and extended it, then released that work for free. I guess if you redefine leech then yes they leeched it.
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I actually have seen something similar since I started to use Chrome. It usually happens when I fire up many tabs from one tab (in my case it happens when I open what I deem fit for further reading from my Google Reader, which can reach up to 30-40 tabs). What appears to happen is that the tabs opened from another tab share the same tab process as the parent tab.
Under other circumstances this might not be a problem, but given the nature of Google Reader when you're scrolling through your unread items list (i.e. it "appends" newer and newer RSS items to the bottom of the list frame itself) it starts to take up a fair amount of ram that isn't freed up when you reload the originating tab (all in the name of caching no doubt).
This has happened less often now that I have Flashblock installed, but still happens occasionally. It also helps that I now open fewer tabs from the Google Reader tab and simply close and reopen it when I'm done reading the tabs that I opened from within the GR tab. This kills the ram eating process and starts a new one.