by Anonymous Coward
on Wednesday July 08, @12:43PM (#28625279)
The clowns working on Firefox had years, YEARS, to get their act together and rewrite the STINKING PILE OF SHIT that is the Firefox codebase. But they chose to flame anyone who dared talk about the massive architectural problem in the absurdly outdated Firefox process model.
Memory protection for each tab? Not possible! Stop asking for something that can't be done! They cried!
Threading for Javascript? Not possible! Stop asking for something that can't be done! The Firefox devs cried!
That is why those AC posts from Firefox devs were so vicious and venomous for everyone pointing out the massive memory/resource leaks in Firefox that have only been somewhat lessened in the latest versions. The solution for those problems involves a complete rewrite of the process and memory model for Firefox.
Now Google came out and humiliated the Firefox devs with Chrome and its amazing realworld threaded Javascript and memory and process protection/isolation.
Nothing but pity and absolutely no sympathy for anyone faced with retrofitting Firefox into a semblance of a modern browser architecture.
Now with full extension support in Chrome this is like hearing about Microsoft scrambling to fix their massive security problems in IE long after you dumped it.
Threading for Javascript? Not possible! Stop asking for something that can't be done! The Firefox devs cried!
Opposition to threading by Firefox devs came from, among others, Brendan Eich, the inventor of Javascript. You can read his well supported arguments on Bugzilla [mozilla.org].
That doesn't excuse Firefox devs from not supporting a parallel architecture earlier, from which users would significantly benefit. But the conversation on that link is an oculus into the reasoning behind not having a parallel architecture earlier.
Hey chill, give em a break. There is something to be said for filtering out every little feature request that gets sent your way. Good filters are how great software stays great (like Linux) and makes sure that the project doesn't veer in the wrong direction. I don't know much about the Firefox developers, but I'd say they have good reason to be filters for a lot of things.
As a sysadmin, I deal all the time with users asking for the latest features, but I have to weigh which ones can be done now, which ones have to wait and which ones shouldn't be done because they are stupid. I try to keep an open mind, but sometimes you get stuck in a rut because of old information or "the way things used to work", so you just have to be patient, try to show the new way and hope that it sinks in.
They're not doing it because Chrome has it, they're doing it because IE8 has it. Microsoft putting this in Internet Explorer before Firefox is basically equivalent to kicking Firefox developers in the nuts.
Mozilla's Benjamin Smedberg says they're currently "[sprinting] as fast as possible to get basic code working, running simple testcase plugins and content tabs in a separate process," after which they'll fix everything that breaks in the process.
This sentence was a little hard to process.
(I note that the "process" of Slashdot incremental improvement has now reached a point where clicking anywhere in the text-entry box causes the box to LOSE focus. If you don't want us using Safari, there are more efficient ways to get us to move.)
For users with anything pre-multi-core (and that's only a few years old), this will result in things getting *slower* because of the process overhead. I hope it senses resources and optimizes appropriately, or all of the friends and relatives I tech-support will be cursing me when the update happens. Some of them are already ticked that when they double-click on the Firefox icon, it takes longer to load than IE because of all the update-phone-home (the sort of thing for which we would all get annoyed at M$).
Eventually we'll get to the point where the window comes up and it takes a ludicrous time to fill . . . just like Windows already does now.
Better philosophical architecture is a good thing. Running well in the practical typical system, in front of the average user, is good too. Disruptive change is not always the way to please your users.
The machine I'm currently on is a single core machine running XP (1.6 GHz if I'm not mistaken...so lazy I don't even want to pull up the specs!). I've been using Chrome for months on this thing and it's lightning fast. Your concern over speed is unfounded.
Even explorer.exe is able to open directories using different processes, if you want. Frankly, I found it frightfully annoying to have X+ tabs open and have ONE of those tabs cause the entire program to crash, usually due to a plugin issue. Made no sense to me. Multi-process/multi-threaded/multi-whatever programming has been around for quite a while now, and multi-core cpus have been pretty common, too.
It's one of the huge advantages that I saw with Chrome (over Firefox). That and program open/new tab open speed. FF 3.5 seems to have addressed this somewhat, but it's still slower, I think.
Hooray for competition, and hooray for finally taking advantage of the hardware out there. Really, for one of the most used applications someone will use, it seems silly to only allow it to use a single-process model.
Most of Gecko is bound together with interfaces defined in IDL and implemented in C++ / JS. This model is called XPCOM and is based off Microsoft's COM in a large part. In theory (though not always in practice), it didn't matter in COM where the interfaces are implemented - single thread, multi-thread, multi-process or even across a network so long as the caller and callee abide by things such as rules for memory allocation, reference counting, object creation etc. I say in theory because some interfaces can be horribly inefficient when called repeatedly over a network, some interfaces might have broken IDL definitions and some interfaces might deal with things like handles or memory addresses which don't translate properly between processes.
One way to implementing multi-process Firefox is first allow XPCOM to work across process. i.e. allow objects to be via XPCOM that are actually spawned in another process, one explicitly created for the task. In COM it had a thing called a running object table (ROT). When you create a process hosted object it looks to see if one is running already, and if not it uses the registry info to spawn one. Then it waits for it to start and then it tells the process to create the object, sets up all the marshaling etc. XPCOM could do something similar, though it would have to do so in a cross-platform manner. I assume that Firefox would have to determine when creating a browser object first if it was chrome or content, and if it was content to spawn a host process and then set up the interfaces. Once set up and assuming the interfaces were efficient, the effect would be largely transparent.
The biggest performance hit would probably be on anything which tried to call or iterate over the DOM boundary between chrome and content. For example chrome which introspected content would suffer because all the calls would have to be serialized / deserialized.
Personally I think its feasible but it would hit performance. An alternative would be to just host plugins in another process. Windowless plugins might be a pain to implement but at least you could kill the other process if a plugin goes nuts which seems to happen all too frequently for me.
They've effectively been there already. It was when Netscape started talking about the browser being the "new desktop" that Microsoft started to see them as a serious threat. Cue the purchase of Spry Mosaic, its rebranding as Internet Explorer and attempt to extinguish Netscape by bundling it with Windows.
by Anonymous Coward
on Wednesday July 08, @12:28PM (#28624995)
What took so long?
Yeah! All they had to do was change their entire codebase from around 5+ years of Firefox (and probably more of Mozilla/Netscape) to update it! That's, what, half an hour's work? And don't give me this "legacy code" bullshit; if they bothered to anticipate our fifty bajillion core processors back then like any NORMAL person should today, they wouldn't be in this mess!
Lazy bastards. I mean, how hard is it to change what is apparently that one really trivial-to-find call in their code to useProcessSeparationOhAndIAlsoWantAPony(true)? Took them long enough...
They had to chance a code base from around 5+ years only because they didn't things right 5+ years ago. Remember, back then they were doing a complete code rewrite anyway.
And no, the true reason to do this is not multicore. That it also gets faster on multicore is just a nice side effect. The true reason to do it is stability. If one page makes problems, you don't lose all the others. This was indeed even more important back when browser and mail was the same program, because it meant that a page crashing your browser could destroy your almost-completed email, too (yes, this has happened to me, although I'm not sure if it was still old Netscape or already new Mozilla). Of course, today it's quite possible that your browser is your mail client again because you're using webmail.
Note that if it were just a performance thing, they could have gone multithreaded instead. This would probably get even better performance.
This should solve a long-standing bug regarding proxies and DNS.
For whatever reason, if you are using a proxy server (It may only pertain to specific proxy configurations, I'm not sure, I do know that the proxy setup where I work triggers this bug), the whole browser will freeze while a DNS lookup executes. NOT good if you accidentally typo a domain.
Ask your admins to change the proxy PAC to not using the isInNet function, as this requires the DNS to check if every domain/hostname exists before deciding what proxy to use... isnt easy to solve...
Funny thing is, they're already in the middle of a major revision project. After Fx2, Brendan Eich released a set of goals for Mozilla 2 [mozillazine.org]. The idea is/was to do a large scale cleanup and refactoring (explicitly not a rewrite, however) in order to get rid of some legacy code still around from overly ambitious plans that didn't pan out (e.g. XPCOM). That was to happen in parallel to the development of Fx3 on Gecko 1.9.0.
It's not clear how much progress has been made on Gecko 2.0—almost no public-fac
They had to chance a code base from around 5+ years only because they didn't things right 5+ years ago. Remember, back then they were doing a complete code rewrite anyway.
Actually it was more like 10 years ago:/
And you're right -- Internet Explorer 4 had a multiprocess model (one process per window), but Mozilla insisted on having everything running in the same process, even the frickin mail client.
A lot of people questioned this at the time, but the response was "That's the way Netscape Communicator 4 does it and everyone loves Netscape 4".
My firefox actually does freeze while rendering a page. It's mostly obvious on my slower linux box. Not that I'm disputing its multi-threaded nature, it clearly *can* do two things at once, just not the things I need it to do (like load slashdot while allowing me to click back to another tab).
A non-blocking call implies multi-threaded design, genius.
It really doesn't. Maybe a similar design to a multithreaded app, but more accurately an event model, not a thread model. It's cooperative multitasking, which means it won't hit multiple processors, and generally won't have anywhere near the same kind of concurrency issues.
I suppose you could make the argument that the OS is doing the threading for you, or that it's a kind of green threads, but at that point, it's both a semantic argument, and it's losing any semblance of meaning of "threaded".
So your single-core cpu is only ever capable of running a single process? The advantages of a multi-process browser go way beyond running the processes on separate cores.
>Most of the people are still running a single core CPU.
Do not confuse multi-process with multi-processor (or multi-core).
Even a single core machine can make use of multiple tasks, or threads, or processes, to get more work done while waiting for one task to complete.
When monolithic code reaches a point where it is waiting for data from the server, it stalls. Multiprocess code has another process it can put to use rendering the images, or playing the goddamed flash.
This isn't really about CPU/Core counts, having tabs/plug-ins running in a separate process is useful because if that page/plug-in crashes that process, the remaining pages won't be effected. I highly doubt they will be dabbling with being able to set which processor a certain process runs on (just yet).
This won't really make use of extra processors/cores, that's what threads (should) already do, even if the application doesn't have any special code to do so.
No commercial program on earth takes advantage of more than two cores...
What? Yes, even some of the "high-end drafting" programs do, every single 3D Modeling and/or Drafting application I have, can use 1, 2, or 4 (and likely upwards, but the highest core/CPU PC I have is 4) as they see fit.
Operating Systems are a "commercial program", and most of them can handle 8, 16, 32 or more processors.
If you have information as to otherwise, I'd be highly interested.
It's not a question of multi-core architecture. No commercial program on earth takes advantage of more than two cores, not even the high-end drafting programs on mirrored quad Xeons.
That is a ridiculously untrue statement. Oracle's database certainly uses more than two cores (yes, even the Windows version). A number of engineering and 3D/rendering packages I'm aware of can use more than two cores.
Mozilla has explored the possibility of adopting a multiprocessing approach for Firefox in the past, but the idea didn't gain serious traction in the Firefox developer community until it was implemented by Google and Microsoft in their respective web browsers.
It was probably too large a project to consider doing without a pressing need. Chrome and IE8 supplied that pressure.
Wow. The Firefox developer community really doesn't care much for its users, does it? I've interacted with them in small ways in the past, and this verification of my suspicions only supports the dim view I take of them.
This is a pretty ungenerous view to take. First off, the Mozilla community is not confined to geeks on Slashdot who care passionately about things like process separation. The Firefox developer community most certainly does care about its users, but the users don't necessarily know that they want, much less could benefit from, process separation. Like Henry Ford said, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." So, Firefox developers delivered what the mass base of users wanted. If anything, you might fault them for being overly user-driven. We can see this in their focus on adding new features, instead of leaving the trivial features as extensions and focusing on performance, standards implementation, and technical features like process separation.
OK I'm a user, and I want a browser where the UI doesn't lag when pages are loading. I also want a browser that doesn't completely freeze when a Java applet launches or PDF file opens. I would also like a browser where I don't have to restart the whole thing when Flash gets borked and refuses to play youtube videos.
Point being there's a lot of user-visible issues and longstanding complaints which are addressed by this. Furthermore, the incumbent browser (IE) doesn't have any of these issues.
(And "Use Adblock and stop using Java/Flash/PDF" is a workaround, not a real solution.)
> First off, the Mozilla community is not confined to geeks on Slashdot who care passionately about things like process separation. The Firefox developer community most certainly does care about its users, but the users don't necessarily know that they want, much less could benefit from, process separation.
That's the same group of developers who wilfully ignore repeated ordinary user requests to give them an option to accept duplicate certificates, even after some big red security warning. To make things worse, it doesn't even bother to display which certificate and which CA are in violation so the user can delete them. On IE, you can click "Continue anyway" to bypass the self-issued certificate duplication and log on to your router, for example.
Their response: it's the fault of your router company.
This is ridiculous. The Mozilla devs definitely think they know better than the users.
It was probably too large a project to consider doing without a pressing need.
Cuz yeah, Flash locking up the entire browser wasn't a pressing need until IE8 and Chrome. Riiiight.
LOTS of us have been asking about this for a VERY long time (years). Leaving it this late is called 'lack of vision'. This should've been in the very first version. Now there IS a ton of code to make this work with. I imagine that's why they call this Electrolysis...it's a hairy problem now that it's been ignored for so long.
I remember some browser (Konqueror, is it?) uses a separate NSPluginViewer process to run Flash. It's the best approach because it let me renice the Flash.
Do you notice Flash runs at a lower priority in IE? (Try running into a busy Flash page and scroll up and down - you'll see the Flash applet slowing down but the UI scrolling of the browser is still responsive.
Not so in Firefox. Hope they'll finally get it right.
Actually, they're talking about multiple processes, not multithreading. Threads all belong to a single process, which, if it crashes, will bring down all of its threads. Running the shell in one process, then each tab/window in its own process means that, much like Chrome, a single page can't bring down the myriad of tabs/windows you might have open, if you browse the web like I do.
The 'multithread bandwagen'? Multithreading is not just some temporary hype that will be gone and forgotten next year. It is A Good Thing. If they get it right it'll be a big improvement to the browser.
Having said that, your concerns that it may be a pain to implement in a browser that was not designed to support them are valid. While I expect them to succeed, you can always stick with an older (single-threaded) version for a while while the most problematic bugs get fixed.
If that's the case, then you were doing something wrong. Firefox rarely uses more than 300mb of memory on my machine and tends not to crash either definitely not 2 to 3 times a day. Also, if you're only using it for 2 or 3 minutes a day, you're clearly doing something specifically to make it crash, because I've had this window open for multiples of that time right now and it has yet to crash
It's become common place for people to blame Firefox for things like Flash crashing or the gunk that comes from browsing. I've been browsing for some time with noscript and without flash and I rarely end up with this kind of trouble. On top of that I have the cache, cookies and history cleared upon exit. And I'm not having any sort of trouble of the sort you're describing.
I don't mind people criticizing Firefox, but this immature trolling because of your own incompetence is enough to make one slightly annoyed.
Forking a process on unix-like systems if fairly lightweight but for Windows this will not scale well at all.
The Microsoft folks don't seem concerned about this, at least not concerned enough to implement it in IE. While I don't doubt that Windows processes are fairly heavyweight, I doubt that they're big enough to cause trouble until the user has hundreds of tabs open.
Why not just have rendering worker threads? Have I missed something?
Although working in multiple threads can increase performance in much the same way that multiple processes can, that's not the major benefit of the multi-process architecture. The big benefit to multiple processes is that if one of them dies for som
Yes, back in the days when a bad web page would crash your browser this was bad, but I have not seen those crashes recently.
Do you run a lot of plug-ins, by any chance? Browser makers don't control plug-in code (other than the code for their own plug-ins, of course), but this code is still capable of taking out a browser process if it goes bad.
If the browser is stable, what benefit do multi-processes have?
The other big benefit is that one process can't hog the CPU: even if one page gets into a ridiculously tight JavaScript loop that bogs that page down, the others should continue to load.
Still, the "if the browser is stable" issue is a very big if, and as I mentioned above, it's not completely under the browser maker's control.
Also, and maybe I should read the details, but if I am authenticated to a website in one tab, does that authentication carry over to other tabs using other processes?
It depends on how the browser is written, but it can be done.
Nice (Score:3, Insightful)
This is cool. Competition is good.
Humiliated By Google's Chrome (Score:4, Insightful)
The clowns working on Firefox had years, YEARS, to get their act together and rewrite the STINKING PILE OF SHIT that is the Firefox codebase. But they chose to flame anyone who dared talk about the massive architectural problem in the absurdly outdated Firefox process model.
Memory protection for each tab? Not possible! Stop asking for something that can't be done! They cried!
Threading for Javascript? Not possible! Stop asking for something that can't be done! The Firefox devs cried!
That is why those AC posts from Firefox devs were so vicious and venomous for everyone pointing out the massive memory/resource leaks in Firefox that have only been somewhat lessened in the latest versions. The solution for those problems involves a complete rewrite of the process and memory model for Firefox.
Now Google came out and humiliated the Firefox devs with Chrome and its amazing realworld threaded Javascript and memory and process protection/isolation.
Nothing but pity and absolutely no sympathy for anyone faced with retrofitting Firefox into a semblance of a modern browser architecture.
Now with full extension support in Chrome this is like hearing about Microsoft scrambling to fix their massive security problems in IE long after you dumped it.
Parent
Re:Humiliated By Google's Chrome (Score:5, Informative)
Threading for Javascript? Not possible! Stop asking for something that can't be done! The Firefox devs cried!
Opposition to threading by Firefox devs came from, among others, Brendan Eich, the inventor of Javascript. You can read his well supported arguments on Bugzilla [mozilla.org].
That doesn't excuse Firefox devs from not supporting a parallel architecture earlier, from which users would significantly benefit. But the conversation on that link is an oculus into the reasoning behind not having a parallel architecture earlier.
Parent
Re:Humiliated By Google's Chrome (Score:5, Insightful)
Hey chill, give em a break. There is something to be said for filtering out every little feature request that gets sent your way. Good filters are how great software stays great (like Linux) and makes sure that the project doesn't veer in the wrong direction. I don't know much about the Firefox developers, but I'd say they have good reason to be filters for a lot of things.
As a sysadmin, I deal all the time with users asking for the latest features, but I have to weigh which ones can be done now, which ones have to wait and which ones shouldn't be done because they are stupid. I try to keep an open mind, but sometimes you get stuck in a rut because of old information or "the way things used to work", so you just have to be patient, try to show the new way and hope that it sinks in.
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Re:Humiliated By Google's Chrome (Score:5, Insightful)
They're not doing it because Chrome has it, they're doing it because IE8 has it. Microsoft putting this in Internet Explorer before Firefox is basically equivalent to kicking Firefox developers in the nuts.
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Re:Diamond Joe Quimby: "It Can Be Two Things" (Score:4, Insightful)
Have they ever advertised against Firefox? I'd be surprised if they did. To compare oneself to a rival is to legitimize that rival.
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Processes, processes, processes! (Score:3, Funny)
Mozilla's Benjamin Smedberg says they're currently "[sprinting] as fast as possible to get basic code working, running simple testcase plugins and content tabs in a separate process," after which they'll fix everything that breaks in the process.
This sentence was a little hard to process.
(I note that the "process" of Slashdot incremental improvement has now reached a point where clicking anywhere in the text-entry box causes the box to LOSE focus. If you don't want us using Safari, there are more efficient ways to get us to move.)
That's good (Score:4, Funny)
I was concerned that Firefox wasn't using as much of my system's RAM as it could. I bought 8GB, and I intend to use it.
In all seriousness, this is good. It should handle crashes and frozen processes better, like Chrome.
Thanks google, and thanks mozilla, for helping to drive competition and make the web browser better.
Nice (Score:5, Interesting)
Competition from Chrome was a good thing: first the Javascript improvements, now separate processes for the plugins.
Re:Nice (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Nice (Score:5, Informative)
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Will this benefit the average user? (Score:3, Insightful)
Eventually we'll get to the point where the window comes up and it takes a ludicrous time to fill . . . just like Windows already does now.
Better philosophical architecture is a good thing. Running well in the practical typical system, in front of the average user, is good too. Disruptive change is not always the way to please your users.
Re:Will this benefit the average user? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
The "About Time" Bandwagon (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll bite. It's about time.
Even explorer.exe is able to open directories using different processes, if you want. Frankly, I found it frightfully annoying to have X+ tabs open and have ONE of those tabs cause the entire program to crash, usually due to a plugin issue. Made no sense to me. Multi-process/multi-threaded/multi-whatever programming has been around for quite a while now, and multi-core cpus have been pretty common, too.
It's one of the huge advantages that I saw with Chrome (over Firefox). That and program open/new tab open speed. FF 3.5 seems to have addressed this somewhat, but it's still slower, I think.
Hooray for competition, and hooray for finally taking advantage of the hardware out there. Really, for one of the most used applications someone will use, it seems silly to only allow it to use a single-process model.
Does that mean distributed XPCOM? (Score:5, Informative)
One way to implementing multi-process Firefox is first allow XPCOM to work across process. i.e. allow objects to be via XPCOM that are actually spawned in another process, one explicitly created for the task. In COM it had a thing called a running object table (ROT). When you create a process hosted object it looks to see if one is running already, and if not it uses the registry info to spawn one. Then it waits for it to start and then it tells the process to create the object, sets up all the marshaling etc. XPCOM could do something similar, though it would have to do so in a cross-platform manner. I assume that Firefox would have to determine when creating a browser object first if it was chrome or content, and if it was content to spawn a host process and then set up the interfaces. Once set up and assuming the interfaces were efficient, the effect would be largely transparent.
The biggest performance hit would probably be on anything which tried to call or iterate over the DOM boundary between chrome and content. For example chrome which introspected content would suffer because all the calls would have to be serialized / deserialized.
Personally I think its feasible but it would hit performance. An alternative would be to just host plugins in another process. Windowless plugins might be a pain to implement but at least you could kill the other process if a plugin goes nuts which seems to happen all too frequently for me.
Re:Does that mean distributed XPCOM? (Score:4, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
They've effectively been there already. It was when Netscape started talking about the browser being the "new desktop" that Microsoft started to see them as a serious threat. Cue the purchase of Spry Mosaic, its rebranding as Internet Explorer and attempt to extinguish Netscape by bundling it with Windows.
Re:About time (Score:5, Funny)
What took so long?
Yeah! All they had to do was change their entire codebase from around 5+ years of Firefox (and probably more of Mozilla/Netscape) to update it! That's, what, half an hour's work? And don't give me this "legacy code" bullshit; if they bothered to anticipate our fifty bajillion core processors back then like any NORMAL person should today, they wouldn't be in this mess!
Lazy bastards. I mean, how hard is it to change what is apparently that one really trivial-to-find call in their code to useProcessSeparationOhAndIAlsoWantAPony(true)? Took them long enough...
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Re:About time (Score:5, Funny)
This is why we can't have nice things.
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Re:About time (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:About time (Score:5, Interesting)
They had to chance a code base from around 5+ years only because they didn't things right 5+ years ago. Remember, back then they were doing a complete code rewrite anyway.
And no, the true reason to do this is not multicore. That it also gets faster on multicore is just a nice side effect. The true reason to do it is stability. If one page makes problems, you don't lose all the others. This was indeed even more important back when browser and mail was the same program, because it meant that a page crashing your browser could destroy your almost-completed email, too (yes, this has happened to me, although I'm not sure if it was still old Netscape or already new Mozilla). Of course, today it's quite possible that your browser is your mail client again because you're using webmail.
Note that if it were just a performance thing, they could have gone multithreaded instead. This would probably get even better performance.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
This should solve a long-standing bug regarding proxies and DNS.
For whatever reason, if you are using a proxy server (It may only pertain to specific proxy configurations, I'm not sure, I do know that the proxy setup where I work triggers this bug), the whole browser will freeze while a DNS lookup executes. NOT good if you accidentally typo a domain.
Re:About time (Score:4, Informative)
Ask your admins to change the proxy PAC to not using the isInNet function, as this
requires the DNS to check if every domain/hostname exists before deciding what proxy
to use... isnt easy to solve...
i work around with this:
if ( shExpMatch(url, "*127.0.0*") ||
shExpMatch(url, "*192.168.*") ||
shExpMatch(url, "*10.15.*") ||
shExpMatch(url, "*10.16.*") ||
shExpMatch(url, "*10.17.*")
){ if ( isInNet(host, "127.0.0.0", "255.0.0.0") ||
isInNet(host, "192.168.0.0", "255.255.0.0") ||
isInNet(host, "10.15.0.0", "255.255.0.0") ||
isInNet(host, "10.16.0.0", "255.255.0.0") ||
isInNet(host, "10.17.0.0", "255.255.0.0")
) { return "DIRECT"; }
else { return "PROXY 192.168.1.10:3128"; }
}
this way it just use the "bad" function if there is a IP in the URL...
all rest, its defined using domains/hostnames, no need for the isInNet
good luck
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Funny thing is, they're already in the middle of a major revision project. After Fx2, Brendan Eich released a set of goals for Mozilla 2 [mozillazine.org]. The idea is/was to do a large scale cleanup and refactoring (explicitly not a rewrite, however) in order to get rid of some legacy code still around from overly ambitious plans that didn't pan out (e.g. XPCOM). That was to happen in parallel to the development of Fx3 on Gecko 1.9.0.
It's not clear how much progress has been made on Gecko 2.0—almost no public-fac
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
They had to chance a code base from around 5+ years only because they didn't things right 5+ years ago. Remember, back then they were doing a complete code rewrite anyway.
Actually it was more like 10 years ago :/
And you're right -- Internet Explorer 4 had a multiprocess model (one process per window), but Mozilla insisted on having everything running in the same process, even the frickin mail client.
A lot of people questioned this at the time, but the response was "That's the way Netscape Communicator 4 does it and everyone loves Netscape 4".
Re:About time (Score:4, Insightful)
A lot of people questioned this at the time, but the response was "That's the way Netscape Communicator 4 does it and everyone loves Netscape 4".
I've heard a lot of words used with Netscape 4. I can confidently say "loved" was never one of them.
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Re:About time (Score:5, Interesting)
Note that if it were just a performance thing, they could have gone multithreaded instead. This would probably get even better performance.
Firefox is already multithreaded (if it weren't the UI would freeze during downloading, rendering, etc).
It amazes me how many people here on slashdot don't understand the differences and distinctions of multi-process vs. multi-threaded.
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Re:About time (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:About time (Score:4, Informative)
A non-blocking call implies multi-threaded design, genius.
It really doesn't. Maybe a similar design to a multithreaded app, but more accurately an event model, not a thread model. It's cooperative multitasking, which means it won't hit multiple processors, and generally won't have anywhere near the same kind of concurrency issues.
I suppose you could make the argument that the OS is doing the threading for you, or that it's a kind of green threads, but at that point, it's both a semantic argument, and it's losing any semblance of meaning of "threaded".
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
if they bothered to anticipate our fifty bajillion core processors back then like any NORMAL person should today, they wouldn't be in this mess!
Processes don't offer more multicore support than threads. What they do offer is clean separation of code that can run independently.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
And if we could remove Adobe Flash player we would never need a second CPU.
Re:About time (Score:5, Informative)
So your single-core cpu is only ever capable of running a single process? The advantages of a multi-process browser go way beyond running the processes on separate cores.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
>Most of the people are still running a single core CPU.
Do not confuse multi-process with multi-processor (or multi-core).
Even a single core machine can make use of multiple tasks, or threads, or processes, to get more work done while waiting for one task to complete.
When monolithic code reaches a point where it is waiting for data from the server, it stalls. Multiprocess code has another process it can put to use rendering the images, or playing the goddamed flash.
Re:About time (Score:5, Informative)
This isn't really about CPU/Core counts, having tabs/plug-ins running in a separate process is useful because if that page/plug-in crashes that process, the remaining pages won't be effected. I highly doubt they will be dabbling with being able to set which processor a certain process runs on (just yet).
This won't really make use of extra processors/cores, that's what threads (should) already do, even if the application doesn't have any special code to do so.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
No commercial program on earth takes advantage of more than two cores...
What? Yes, even some of the "high-end drafting" programs do, every single 3D Modeling and/or Drafting application I have, can use 1, 2, or 4 (and likely upwards, but the highest core/CPU PC I have is 4) as they see fit.
Operating Systems are a "commercial program", and most of them can handle 8, 16, 32 or more processors.
If you have information as to otherwise, I'd be highly interested.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It's not a question of multi-core architecture. No commercial program on earth takes advantage of more than two cores, not even the high-end drafting programs on mirrored quad Xeons.
That is a ridiculously untrue statement. Oracle's database certainly uses more than two cores (yes, even the Windows version). A number of engineering and 3D/rendering packages I'm aware of can use more than two cores.
Re:About time (Score:5, Informative)
According to the Ars coverage [arstechnica.com]:
It was probably too large a project to consider doing without a pressing need. Chrome and IE8 supplied that pressure.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Wow. The Firefox developer community really doesn't care much for its users, does it? I've interacted with them in small ways in the past, and this verification of my suspicions only supports the dim view I take of them.
Re:About time (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:About time (Score:5, Insightful)
OK I'm a user, and I want a browser where the UI doesn't lag when pages are loading. I also want a browser that doesn't completely freeze when a Java applet launches or PDF file opens. I would also like a browser where I don't have to restart the whole thing when Flash gets borked and refuses to play youtube videos.
Point being there's a lot of user-visible issues and longstanding complaints which are addressed by this. Furthermore, the incumbent browser (IE) doesn't have any of these issues.
(And "Use Adblock and stop using Java/Flash/PDF" is a workaround, not a real solution.)
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Re:About time (Score:5, Insightful)
> First off, the Mozilla community is not confined to geeks on Slashdot who care passionately about things like process separation. The Firefox developer community most certainly does care about its users, but the users don't necessarily know that they want, much less could benefit from, process separation.
That's the same group of developers who wilfully ignore repeated ordinary user requests to give them an option to accept duplicate certificates, even after some big red security warning. To make things worse, it doesn't even bother to display which certificate and which CA are in violation so the user can delete them. On IE, you can click "Continue anyway" to bypass the self-issued certificate duplication and log on to your router, for example.
Their response: it's the fault of your router company.
This is ridiculous. The Mozilla devs definitely think they know better than the users.
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Re:About time (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:About time (Score:5, Funny)
It was probably too large a project to consider doing without a pressing need.
Cuz yeah, Flash locking up the entire browser wasn't a pressing need until IE8 and Chrome. Riiiight.
LOTS of us have been asking about this for a VERY long time (years). Leaving it this late is called 'lack of vision'. This should've been in the very first version. Now there IS a ton of code to make this work with. I imagine that's why they call this Electrolysis...it's a hairy problem now that it's been ignored for so long.
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NSPluginViewer? (Score:4, Interesting)
I remember some browser (Konqueror, is it?) uses a separate NSPluginViewer process to run Flash. It's the best approach because it let me renice the Flash.
Do you notice Flash runs at a lower priority in IE? (Try running into a busy Flash page and scroll up and down - you'll see the Flash applet slowing down but the UI scrolling of the browser is still responsive.
Not so in Firefox. Hope they'll finally get it right.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
That sounds like a job for killall!
Re:So sad... (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, they're talking about multiple processes, not multithreading. Threads all belong to a single process, which, if it crashes, will bring down all of its threads. Running the shell in one process, then each tab/window in its own process means that, much like Chrome, a single page can't bring down the myriad of tabs/windows you might have open, if you browse the web like I do.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The 'multithread bandwagen'? Multithreading is not just some temporary hype that will be gone and forgotten next year. It is A Good Thing. If they get it right it'll be a big improvement to the browser.
Having said that, your concerns that it may be a pain to implement in a browser that was not designed to support them are valid. While I expect them to succeed, you can always stick with an older (single-threaded) version for a while while the most problematic bugs get fixed.
Re:Restart Firefox Only Once A Month??? LOL! (Score:4, Insightful)
It's become common place for people to blame Firefox for things like Flash crashing or the gunk that comes from browsing. I've been browsing for some time with noscript and without flash and I rarely end up with this kind of trouble. On top of that I have the cache, cookies and history cleared upon exit. And I'm not having any sort of trouble of the sort you're describing.
I don't mind people criticizing Firefox, but this immature trolling because of your own incompetence is enough to make one slightly annoyed.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Forking a process on unix-like systems if fairly lightweight but for Windows this will not scale well at all.
The Microsoft folks don't seem concerned about this, at least not concerned enough to implement it in IE. While I don't doubt that Windows processes are fairly heavyweight, I doubt that they're big enough to cause trouble until the user has hundreds of tabs open.
Why not just have rendering worker threads? Have I missed something?
Although working in multiple threads can increase performance in much the same way that multiple processes can, that's not the major benefit of the multi-process architecture. The big benefit to multiple processes is that if one of them dies for som
Re:I think I prefer a single process (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, back in the days when a bad web page would crash your browser this was bad, but I have not seen those crashes recently.
Do you run a lot of plug-ins, by any chance? Browser makers don't control plug-in code (other than the code for their own plug-ins, of course), but this code is still capable of taking out a browser process if it goes bad.
If the browser is stable, what benefit do multi-processes have?
The other big benefit is that one process can't hog the CPU: even if one page gets into a ridiculously tight JavaScript loop that bogs that page down, the others should continue to load.
Still, the "if the browser is stable" issue is a very big if, and as I mentioned above, it's not completely under the browser maker's control.
Also, and maybe I should read the details, but if I am authenticated to a website in one tab, does that authentication carry over to other tabs using other processes?
It depends on how the browser is written, but it can be done.
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