Slashdot Mirror


Firefox Finally Confirms 'Largest Change Ever' Featuring Electrolysis In v48 (zdnet.com)

Firefox is finally getting multi-process support. Mozilla has announced that Electrolysis (e10s) will be available to users starting Firefox 48. The foundation finds it the most significant Firefox change since the browser's inception. From a ZDNet report: With Electrolysis, Firefox can use child processes for content (tabs), media playback and legacy plug-ins. This is some way short of Google Chrome, which uses a different process for each tab. However, the result is that Chrome is a huge resource hog: Chrome uses roughly twice as much memory as Firefox on Windows and Linux. Eric Rahm has run some browser tests with Electrolysis, and says: "Overall we see a 10-20 percent increase in memory usage for the 1 content process case (which is what we plan on shipping initially). This seems like a fair trade-off for potential security and performance benefits." With 8 content processes, Rahm says: "we see roughly a doubling of memory usage on the TabsOpenSettled measurement. It's a bit worse on Windows, a bit better on OS X, but it's not 8 times worse."The aforementioned feature will be available in Firefox 48 Beta shortly.

2 of 187 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Honestly? by LichtSpektren · · Score: 5, Informative

    Sandboxing all of FF's plugins is good security practice.

    If I understand correctly, Mozilla is re-writing their layout engine in Rust, which should be considerably more secure than Blink (Chrome's engine). But that's still in alpha stage.

  2. Re:Honestly? by buchner.johannes · · Score: 3, Informative

    There are over 2,400 open bugs right now, and that doesn't include the many thousands that they've supposedly fixed in the past.

    Chromium has 51353 open issues, Firefox has >10000, webkit has >10000. So according to your logic, Rust is the best!

    --
    NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.