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Comment by krylon | Hacker News Reader

Honest question: The interesting question, IMHO, is not how much Chrome is affected, but how strong the impact is compared to other browsers. Do they suffer similarly? Have they found a way to avoid enlarging the memory footprint? Do they ignore the issue?

(Please tell me it's not number 3!)

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https://security.googleblog.com/2018/07/mitigating-spectre-w... says that they've been working on site isolation (one process per domain, so potentially several per tab) for many years. chrome has been multiprocess (process per tab) since day one and it took other browsers years to catch up with being multiprocess. So if other browsers decide to pursue this approach, it'll likely take them years as well. So 3 doesn't seem super unlikely to me :-/

They are not ignoring the issue, but they also do not have this mitigation in place.

Getting there will take a long time. Chrome got lucky - they've been working on this for ages, and they happened to be rolling this out right when Spectre landed.

Firefox is definitely working on this in Project Fission. Bringing down memory per process is crucial and a big focus right now. (I think getting resource sharing down to a science will also be important.)

I'm a fan of Firefox but admit Chrome has an advantage in this situation, while Firefox has had the advantage of resource sharing within the process to keep memory down. Last estimate I saw suggested over a year for it to arrive.

As an illustration of how this approach affects the landscape for all browsers, TechCrunch regularly loads 30 origins on a single page.

It's being actively worked on in Firefox. See e.g. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.platform....

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