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Comment by bitslayer | Hacker News Reader

The whole point of having separate processes for each tab is that it isolates them. If one crashes, the others remain up. It supports multiple processors, too.

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I would ask you to open up your task manager and try picking the largest-in-memory Chrome task and kill it, then see if you still think they are completely isolated. I agree with your point, but give it a shot.

I don't think that's really fair, the largest Chrome task in memory isn't a tab or extension. Yes I suppose it isn't perfectly isolated and if something happens to the main program task it will obviously cause problems but if a single page or extension crashes everything else lives on.

It's a perfectly fair point. The fact that the largest Chrome task by far is not a tab or extension at all, but is the core of Chrome itself, indicates that maybe - just maybe - Chrome isn't doing as good a job of keeping things isolated as it should. That process shouldn't be doing a whole lot beyond driving the UI and managing the lifecycles of its children.

The point is to isolate any code which renders HTML, plugins, etc., i.e., anything which processes untrusted external input, something which the main process does not do.

That is chrome itself...of course closing the parent process of a bunch of processes that are tied to it and that it monitors is going to close them all.

I've used the Chrome task manager to kill tabs. There is one process in there that's just called "Browser"--that's obviously the parent, and the UI won't let you kill it.

You might be referring to the OS task manager, but I don't use that--don't need to. I think the fact that Chrome has its own task manager is a killer feature.

Firefox followed Chrome's lead. It also has separate processes for each tab now.

In the stable version? I would doubt that, because my Firefox still freezes.

No. Firefox's multi-process support ("Electrolysis" aka e10s) is only enabled in the Nightly channel. Firefox does not yet use tab-per-process like Chrome. Nightly only uses two processes: one from the browser (the "chrome" process) and one for all tabs (the content process). You don't get crash or security isolation between tabs when they all share one content process, but that process can be sandboxed by the OS and it reduces memory overhead. Firefox will later experiment with multiple content processes, comparing one vs N tabs per process.

It already does. Electrolysis allows you to specify how many processes you want to allow maximum.

Firefox on my PC seems to disagree with you. Try to use any site with a Flash video player since some of the recent updates and you're very likely to see a hang. I don't know whether the cause is Firefox or Flash, but the end result is still taking out the entire browser session, not just the tab with the Flash video.

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