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Comment by deprave | Hacker News Reader

Have you ever seen the source base of a browser like Firefox or Chrome? You must do small incremental improvements if you want your software to continue to work. The hardest part is disentangling everything from a single process architecture to multiprocess. That's what they're doing now. Switching from a single content process to multiple content processes is significantly easier.

I don't understand how you conclude that "they do not plan separating each to into a different process" from the link you posted given it opens with "After e10s is enabled for all users, the next step is to introduce multiple content processes." To answer your question, then, the point of introducing e10s is to make it easier to switch from a single process to multiprocess architecture.

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Yes, but few lines below they wrote: "The (practically) unlimited process count is on some platforms not a realistic goal, and having a separate process for each open site instances or even sites does not seem like a reachable goal (for now at least)."

So per-tab content processes (which btw is the only way e10s can result in security and stability benefits) is not a realistic goal for them.

I'm not aware of any browser that implements "per-tab content processes". For example, Chrome caps the number of content processes and multiple tabs in Chrome start sharing the same content process once enough tabs are open.

Technically speaking, it's a lot easier to do a separate process per tab, and let things crash just like any other running process. If they don't stop there and try to actually manage processes by themselves according to some messed up logic, then yes, I agree with you that there's no point to e10s and probably Mozilla.

> and let things crash just like any other running process

People always say that as if crashes would be a regular thing happening every few minutes. I don't experience browser crashes for days, so I find it kind of odd that such a relatively rare failure case is considered a good justification for using a process per tab.

I stopped using Chrome a couple of years ago because of multiple crashes per day. The browser itself didn't crash, but individual tabs did. Or else Chrome tabs failed to load (giving just a pale blue background) presumably because it had run out of RAM.

I used OneTab for a while, to reduce memory use, but still found Firefox more efficient and more stable with hundreds of tabs, mainly because the vast majority weren't actually loaded until I needed them.

It's not hard to crash Firefox -- just keep loading an infinite page of gifs etc. But once you know that, you don't do it.

Under normal working conditions, I agree: none of the main browsers crashes often enough for it to be a problem.

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