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

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.

Comments

Why processes instead of threads?

[JoeyRox]

Why are they using 4 separate processes to improve load times of multiple tabs/windows instead of just multiple threads?

Re:Why processes instead of threads?

[thegreatbob]

I can't speak for their reasoning, but Windows threads are definitely less portable (multiproc should leave less cross-platform stuff to wrangle). Also shared address space and environment between threads and the main program (might be appropriate from a security standpoint). It used to be that Windows threads did not scale (performance-wise) very well, though I don't know how much that has changed since this was published:
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.o...

If anyone has insight on Windows multithreading performance, I'm all ears, as this may be one of the bigger reasons.