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Mozilla The Internet News

Firefox To Get Multi-Process Browsing 383

An anonymous reader writes with news that multi-process browsing will be coming to Firefox. The project is called Electrolysis, and the developers "have already assembled a prototype that renders a page in a separate process from the interface shell in which it is displayed." 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. Further details of their plan are available on the Mozilla wiki, and a summary is up at TechFragments.
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Firefox To Get Multi-Process Browsing

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  • by jeffb (2.718) ( 1189693 ) on Wednesday July 08, 2009 @01:23PM (#28624935)

    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)

    by Junior J. Junior III ( 192702 ) on Wednesday July 08, 2009 @01:26PM (#28624963) Homepage

    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.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08, 2009 @01:28PM (#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...

  • by Krneki ( 1192201 ) on Wednesday July 08, 2009 @01:33PM (#28625095)
    Most of the people are still running a single core CPU.
    And if we could remove Adobe Flash player we would never need a second CPU.
  • by Ethanol-fueled ( 1125189 ) on Wednesday July 08, 2009 @01:36PM (#28625157) Homepage Journal
    Really. And all this wouldn't even be a problem if they just wrote it in Java to begin with.

    This is why we can't have nice things.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08, 2009 @01:39PM (#28625209)
    Great. Now firefox can consume 1GB of memory in each of four separate processes. Guess I'll have to add more memory...
  • by vlm ( 69642 ) on Wednesday July 08, 2009 @01:59PM (#28625535)

    .... said the six digit UID to the seven digit UID.

  • by Tumbleweed ( 3706 ) * on Wednesday July 08, 2009 @02:00PM (#28625561)

    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.

  • by Captain Segfault ( 686912 ) on Wednesday July 08, 2009 @02:09PM (#28625713) Homepage Journal

    That sounds like a job for killall!

  • hey... (Score:1, Funny)

    by whopub ( 1100981 ) on Wednesday July 08, 2009 @02:19PM (#28625881)

    Get the Java dick out of your ass please.

    Hey, leave the other dude alone and wait for your turn.

  • by feepness ( 543479 ) on Wednesday July 08, 2009 @02:36PM (#28626185)

    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...

    The hard part wasn't the process separation, it was the pony.

  • by Jesus_666 ( 702802 ) on Wednesday July 08, 2009 @02:38PM (#28626227)
    Since when does an OutOfMemoryException crash the VM?
  • by Bakkster ( 1529253 ) <Bakkster@man.gmail@com> on Wednesday July 08, 2009 @02:44PM (#28626313)
    Since everything crashes the JVM.
  • by RichM ( 754883 ) on Wednesday July 08, 2009 @03:03PM (#28626677) Homepage

    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.

    Dunno about anyone else, but it gives me a warm fuzzy feeling to know that everytime I start up Firefox there's probably a couple of lines in the code from Netscape 4.x.
    Simpler days back then, none of this Facebooktweetfrommyiphonegoogleajax2.0 nonsense.
    We had Napster 1.0 and Hotbot, good times... you can keep the 56k modems though.

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