Mozilla lays out multi-process Firefox engineering goals | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla lays out multi-process Firefox engineering goals

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30 pointscarusen11 comments

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.

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... (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?

Are you sure that Firefox sandboxes Flash? Care to give a reference?

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 This isn't a problem if you've got a standard up-to-date home computer, but is a problem for someone with outdated hardware like me.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.

How about updating your junker pc? I've been wait for Mozilla to do this for a long while, I have 8 threads available for use and I hate to see Firefox max out one thread and become unresponsive.

With the MHZ wall still being a problem for CPU advancement all signs point to multi-threading being the future.

"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.

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

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.

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

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.

Link to the original blog post: http://blog.mozilla.com/products/2011/07/15/goals-for-multi-...

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?

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