Firefox Takes the Next Step Towards Rolling Out Multi-Process To Everyone (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: With Firefox 50, Mozilla has rolled out the first major piece of its new multi-process architecture. Edge, Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Safari all have a multiple process design that separates their rendering engine -- the part of the browser that reads and interprets HTML, CSS, and JavaScript -- from the browser frame. They do this for stability reasons (if the rendering process crashes, it doesn't kill the entire browser) and security reasons (the rendering process can be run in a low-privilege sandbox, so exploitable flaws in the rendering engine are harder to take advantage of). Moreover, these browsers can all create multiple rendering engine processes and use different processes for different tabs. This means that the scope of a crash is narrowed even further, typically to a single tab. Internet Explorer and Chrome both implemented this long ago, in 2009. Firefox, however, has not offered a similar design. Although work on a multi-process browser was started in 2009, under the codename Electrolysis, that work was suspended between 2011 and 2013 as priorities within the organization shifted. In response, Mozilla started switching to a new extension system in 2015 that opened the door to a multi-process design. The first stage of Firefox's move to multi-process involves separating the browser shell from a single rendering process that's used by every tab. In Firefox 48, that feature was enabled for a small number of users who used no extensions. Firefox 49 was rolled out to include users running a limited selection of extensions. Now, in Firefox 50, a separate renderer process is used for most users and most extensions. Developers are now able to mark their extensions as explicitly multi-process compatible. Firefox 51 will extend this even further to cover all extensions, except those that are explicitly marked as incompatible. Mozilla says that, even with the limited changes made in Firefox 50, responsiveness of the browser has improved by 400 percent due to the separation between the renderer and the browser shell. During page loads, responsiveness will increase to 700 percent.

Comments

Re:Firefox...hmmm

[Motherfucking Shit]

It's coming back, albeit gradually. They're getting rid of bloatware like Hello, Pocket is easy to disable, and Classic Theme Restorer still works fine even though it shouldn't have to exist. Going from 47 to 50, memory usage has dropped for me. I still see some hiccups. Ghostery doesn't work properly for me in 50.x (its dialog is blank). According to the Add-on Compatibility Reporter, about half my addons are "Not compatible with multiprocess," so I won't turn that on. And something changed between 50.0.2 and 50.1 that causes brief freezes when I'm scrolling.

I at least feel like they're finally moving the project in a good direction, being a good browser instead of trying to be an entire OS.

Re:Firefox...hmmm

[sremick]

Chrome? Isn't that the trojan that gets bundled with every unrelated download one finds on the internet, and then once it gets sneaks onto a user's computer and tricks the user into making it their default browser, arrogantly takes over the computer spawning a dozen background processes that exhaust all available CPU and RAM, bringing everything to a crawl?

I've been in IT for decades, and have been rather ambivalent about Firefox-vs-Chrome until just recently, mainly just being content as long as users weren't using IE. However, despite any influence from me, I've seen countless longtime Chrome fans abandoning it and coming back to Firefox because of the background process/CPU/RAM issue I mention above. This is also being seen on both Windows and Mac platforms... it's not specific to either OS. At my work, Firefox continues to be the deployed browser of choice to all the many thousands of computers we manage because Chrome is an ass and thinks you don't want to use your computer for anything but web browsing.