
Mozilla lays out multi-process Firefox engineering goals - carusen
http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Mozilla-lays-out-multi-process-Firefox-engineering-goals-1280853.html
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experimental
On the article - What Mozilla are doing first with Electrolysis is like
WebKit2, rather than like Chrome which is almost-but-not-there-yet process
per-domain which will come later. There was also some original research which
went into Firefox 4 with per-compartment garbage collection.

They're also looking at a multi-threaded DOM in Rust.

In case anyone hasn't been keeping up with it, Flash was already sandboxed
months ago, before Chrome implemented it (this is different from Out Of
Process Plug-ins).

I recommend you disable the Google Updater plug-in which takes up memory and
doesn't really do much of value considering it shouldn't be in Firefox in the
first place. NoScript has a click-to-play for Flash built-in so if you're
using Flashblock get rid of it because it conflicts with NoScript.

~~~
evmar
Chrome's flag for sandboxing plugins dates back to before the code was open-
sourced:
[http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/chrome/commo...](http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/chrome/common/chrome_switches.cc?revision=15&view=markup)
(search for "safe-plugins"). The reason it was never on by default for Flash
is that you can't sandbox Flash without breaking Flash functionality. How did
Firefox solve this problem?

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FreeFull
Having separate processes for each tab will increase resource usage. This
isn't a problem if you've got a standard up-to-date home computer, but is a
problem for someone with outdated hardware like me. The thing is, there
currently is no other browser that matches what Firefox can do for me in terms
of plugins and tab management (particularly the ability not to load all tabs
on start-up, but only the one I was looking at, which is helpful for saving
RAM and bandwidth). If Firefox moves in a way that increases its resource
usage, what alternative will there be for me? I will refuse to use an old
version, and will be just left behind.

Note that I am welcome for suggestions of browsers that can potentially be a
Firefox replacement if Firefox ever is no longer usable due to high
requirements.

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Teckla
"Having separate processes for each tab will increase resource usage."

My PC is a single core 1.66 GHz Atom running Windows 7 Professional in 1 GB of
RAM.

I can assure you multi-process Chrome outperforms Firefox on this machine,
both in performance and memory use for real-world browsing.

You should double check your assumption about separate processes increasing
resource usage.

~~~
FreeFull
Last time I tried Chromium, it used more RAM than Firefox for me for the same
amount of tabs open. Maybe things have changed now. My laptop by the way is a
1.4GHz Celeron M with 768MB RAM

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rbanffy
This could be specially interesting for the ARM crowd. If this makes it easier
to spread browser activity across more separate processes, a 4 or 8-way simple
ARM core-based chip could be a viable platform for a desktop.

It's a long shot, I agree.

~~~
iam
What makes you think their code isn't multi-threaded as it is?

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rbanffy
I know it is. But threads are vulnerable to all sorts of synchronization
problems different processes sharing nothing but read-only executable pages
aren't. Besides, each process would also run on one or more threads, making
thread-count go up. It just looks like it's an arrangement friendlier to many-
core machines.

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samstokes
Link to the original blog post:
[http://blog.mozilla.com/products/2011/07/15/goals-for-
multi-...](http://blog.mozilla.com/products/2011/07/15/goals-for-multi-
process-firefox/)

Both this and the write-up are curiously short on roadmaps or predictions
though, and the Electrolysis page on the Mozilla wiki only talks about work
already done (content processes in Fennec, the mobile version of Firefox, and
out-of-process plugins). Given the benefits this will bring, I'd love to know
when it's likely to arrive!

I know some Mozillans (?) sometimes post here - anyone have any idea what
stage Electrolysis for desktop Firefox has got to?

