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Firefox 54 Arrives With Multi-Process Support For All Users (venturebeat.com)

Posted by msmash on from the browser-news dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla today launched Firefox 54 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. The new version includes the next major phase of multi-process support, which streamlines memory use, improving responsiveness and speed. The Electrolysis project, which is the largest change to Firefox code ever, is live. Firefox now uses up to four processes to run webpage content across all open tabs. This means that complex webpages in one tab have a much lower impact on responsiveness and speed in other tabs, and Firefox finally makes better use of your computer's hardware.

2 of 102 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Why processes instead of threads? by williamyf · · Score: 5, Informative

    Because it is the way is done in Chrome.

    Now more seriously, is because of sandboxing. A process is forbiden to read or write on the memory space of another process, meanwhile every thread indide a process can read/write in the memory space of it's sister's threads (i am a spanish speaker. hebra=thread is femenine for us)...

    So, if you used threads instead of processes, thread handling tab from malicious website a, coud trivially snoop/hack/crash websites in tabs b,c,d,e....

    With processes, this becomes much much harder...

    But in the end, is because chrome has been doing it like that since inception, and Firechrome-er i mean, fox, firefox, imitates chrome

    --
    *** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
  2. Re:Why processes instead of threads? by brianerst · · Score: 5, Informative

    They explain it pretty thoroughly in their Medium post about Firefox 54.

    It's mainly about using less memory. The maximum number of processes is configurable (about:config dom.ipc.processCount) and defaults to 4. During extensive testing, four processes gave the best combination of speed and memory utilization. Memory utilization was quite a bit lower than Chrome (Chrome used anywhere from 36-77% more RAM).

    The first four tabs you open spin off individual processes and then new tabs are attached to existing processes (they don't say how this is done - round-robin or some sort of load balancer).

    Four processes is supposed to be the best for systems that have 8G of RAM or less. If you have more, you can bump up the processCount.