Mozilla has announced today that the Electrolysis project, which aims to make Firefox a multiprocess application, will be put in pause for the foreseeable future.

The reason, the amount of changes required at the architectural level are so deep that it will require a large amount of resources to make this happen. At the same time, it is possible to get some important responsiveness improvements with much smaller investments.

Announced a couple of years ago, Electrolysis was expected to place each plugin, each tab, and the user interface in a separate process of their own. This way, at least theoretically, no matter what problem a web page could present, it wouldn’t take down the whole application. As a side benefit, it would prevent cross site scripting attacks since an attacking web site wouldn’t be able to access content in another tab.

According to the same post, Mozilla has identified several other areas where responsiveness can be improved, including database and memory garbage collection optimization, that require much smaller investments of time, so these are now being prioritized.