Comments on: Future Firefox will be multiprocess

By: Lennie

Lennie — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 22:18:02 +0000

@Ncrdrg Process seperation is already in Firefox 4 Mobile, Firefox 4 (desktop) does not have it yet. But it is planned for the next release after that.

By: Ncrdrg

Ncrdrg — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 00:11:58 +0000

Still can’t wait for this to appear.

This approach is about the single and only major advantage Chrome holds over Firefox. And it’s exactly why Chrome fascinated me so much. Sandboxing offers great security, isolates tabs so they can only crash by themselves (it’s very rare though) but most importantly, separate the memory management.

The biggest and most annoying complaint I have about Firefox is that I love keeping the browser open for hours, for days sometimes. But it has always had problems with memory leaks and the consomption growing steadily over time and over use. By isolating the tab to a single process, the memory consumption is completely freed.

When this project comes to Firefox, I likely won’t ever have to look at any other browser out there because everything else it has is superior, except maybe speed which honestly isn’t that much of a bother and it gets better with Firefox 4.

By: Hike Mall

Hike Mall — Sat, 25 Dec 2010 20:15:17 +0000

That sounds like the worst of both worlds, plus some new terribleness!

Single-process by default (same stability, performance, and memory fragmentation issues as today). Added UI complexity for everybody. Added internal complexity to support both modes.

And for what? Just so when you open Windows Task Manager you see fewer .exe’s?

Please don’t punish us users just because you like to see a short list in Windows Task Manager, and it’s not smart enough to do process grouping (like the Mac and Linux task managers do).

By: Braniac

Braniac — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 09:31:04 +0000

The ff greyout sucks so much. Uploading images to a laboratory and whole ff stays gray. I cannot start a second instace cause the config files are locked from the hanging ff. We are in jul 2010, when will a threaded ff available?

By: Aaron

Aaron — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 09:04:24 +0000

Great! I really hope an informative task manager will go along with this, so one can single out resource hogs by tab, extension and plugin (like one can already in Google Chrome) or even the combinations of those (e.g. in which tab has the Flash plugin gone nuts or better which precise flash animation).
Right on!

By: Jared Haer

Jared Haer — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 21:44:19 +0000

Firefox could stand to improve it’s use of multiple processors. I have often noticed when Firefox is sluggish one core is maxed out at 100% utilization, while the other one is at almost 0%. I will follow this project closely as I am very excited about what it may offer!

By: Mike Hall

Mike Hall — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 20:17:21 +0000

Is it possible to have the best of both worlds? Continue single-process Firefox tabs, plus an option to create a new tab as a new process: basically as a new window, which looks like a tab, but perhaps in a different colour?

By: First results of Electrolysis, multi-process Firefox - Mozilla Links

First results of Electrolysis, multi-process Firefox - Mozilla Links — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 15:58:16 +0000

[...] A few weeks ago, Mozilla announced Electrolysis, a new project that aims to make Firefox a multi-process application, with separate processes for the user interface (chrome), each tab, and plugins, in order to provide higher stability as a a problem with a plugin or a certain web page wouldn’t bring down the whole session; higher performace, as today’s multi-core processors can handle multiple tasks at a time; and stronger security, as each could run on different security contexts. [...]

By: venkat

venkat — Sun, 17 May 2009 12:04:04 +0000

single tab process always useful as Firefox is getting crashed common now a days ,if firefox crashed with this feature wonly one tab will be lost.

By: Amar

Amar — Tue, 12 May 2009 16:51:59 +0000

If the goals of this project is to provide better responsiveness and improve robustness as a result – I think there can be another way than to use multiple processes. There is a screen cast on how we ensure responsiveness in Firefox by separating each JS application with an isolation called Script Space.

http://people.cs.vt.edu/~adeka/jstests/anim/mutidiv.htm

This is the example code that was run.
http://people.cs.vt.edu/~adeka/jstests/test_set/multidiv.html

A click on the button would cause the browser to run a busy JavaScript loop .Firefox will not be able to process any more event unless the loop completes.

We believe that JavaScript executions can be isolated if they belong to different events & different Script Space( this is a grouping of events based on DOM hierarchy) each event running in a separate thread. Threads then can be scheduled to ensure fairness in execution. By separating the execution of the onclick handlers , we can click on the second button while the other one is running its onclick handler – Thus ensuring responsiveness.

By: JP

JP — Mon, 11 May 2009 21:17:33 +0000

Finally!
Better late then never, this is one of the things that have been long overdue.

By: Mike Lewis

Mike Lewis — Mon, 11 May 2009 03:55:00 +0000

I’d be happy if it just ran in Linux as fast as it does in Windows.

By: Percy Cabello

Percy Cabello — Mon, 11 May 2009 03:47:26 +0000

Thanks Alex. That was a mistake I’ve just been able to correct. Sorry for any confusion this may have caused.

By: True Falcon

True Falcon — Sun, 10 May 2009 20:48:07 +0000

Re the pdf files – go to options/applications. enter pdf in the search box. change the action to ‘use Foxit Reader’. Now the pdfs will automatically download in the browser downloader and open outside in the reader. Problem solved.

By: Brian

Brian — Sun, 10 May 2009 16:45:39 +0000

Speed and security is the real advantage of having a multi-process web browser.

By: Chuck in Dallas

Chuck in Dallas — Sun, 10 May 2009 16:21:29 +0000

Firefox is starting to fall behind. I’ll stick to it because of the great plugins but my original interest in FF was because it was cutting edge and fast.

Now it seems like a technology laggard and bloated. I hope they get their act together before Chrome or Safari comes from behind in innovation. Never mid IE, I won;t go back to MS.

By: leandro

leandro — Sun, 10 May 2009 06:20:59 +0000

and about the new:tab ?? sorry if you blogged earlier, i cant remember…

By: Multi-Process Support Coming to Firefox « The Firefox Extension Guru’s Blog

Sat, 09 May 2009 21:57:30 +0000

[...] in the early phases and likely won’t be part of Firefox 3.5, but rather Firefox 3.6. From Mozilla Links: Mozilla has started a new project to make Firefox split in several processes at a time: one [...]

By: Multi-Process Coming to Firefox « The Firefox Extension Guru’s Blog

Multi-Process Coming to Firefox « The Firefox Extension Guru’s Blog — Sat, 09 May 2009 20:38:51 +0000

By: NuShrike

NuShrike — Fri, 08 May 2009 18:49:44 +0000

This is all about moving the responsibility for managing disparate sessions to the layer/experts whom know it best, the OS. It does reduce the ability to share memory and makes IPC more difficult, but that’s great security-wise.

Basically, exactly what Apache and PostgreSQL has ben doing for years.

By: Ben Werdmuller

Ben Werdmuller — Fri, 08 May 2009 08:35:23 +0000

In my opinion this is where Mozilla need to be looking to improve the browser. All the new evolutionary features they’re looking into are fine, but ultimately a browser needs to be an almost-invisible, efficient way of getting to web content and applications. I’ve found myself moving to Chrome for day-to-day tasks, and it’s going to take massively-improved performance from a multi-process Firefox to get me to move back.

By: Lennie

Lennie — Fri, 08 May 2009 06:40:35 +0000

@Nils You most be using the windows default taskmanager which doesn’t list parent/child relationships for processes. I think the problem here is the taskmanager.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Fri, 08 May 2009 05:41:56 +0000

Alex is right here. Multiprocessing isn’t going to be directly improved by splitting into more prosesses, but it could lead to those processes being more “threaded” than Firefox is now.
I’m too a sloppy user with sessions of 50 tabs or so. They arent all flash and pdf, more like wikipedia and API-references. So is Firefox gonna start up 50 processes when I fire up one of those saved sessions?

By: Neona

Neona — Fri, 08 May 2009 00:30:46 +0000

I would think so, but I don’t think i’ve /ever/ actually seen firefox tap more than one core, even when lagging under heavy load (loading 20+ tabs, for example). I always thought that was weird, so for some reason it must be confined to one core even though it is multithreaded. I hope this fixes that some, whatever the issue is.

The sandboxing is nice too, i dont like firefox freaking out because one page is somehow messing it up.

By: Alex Bishop

Alex Bishop — Thu, 07 May 2009 21:39:25 +0000

Careful with the terminology here: Firefox already has multiprocessor support because it uses multiple threads; this project is about moving from a single processes to multiple processes.