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.
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 But they chose to flame anyone who dared talk about the massive architectural problem in the absurdly outdated Firefox process model.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.
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.
Re:Humiliated By Google's Chrome (Score:3, Insightful)
Uhm, the firefox javascript engine supports multithreading just fine, and gecko 1.9 supports multithreaded javascript out of the box, the previous branch required some extra effort to do so what it most certainly would allow multiple javascript threads.
Not really sure what the hell you're talking about but I have a couple Firefox extensions that depend on the fact that they can use multiple threads.
This is all documented on mozdev, both the new methods for gecko 1.9 and the workarounds to do it in the 1.8.x branch.
I've been using multiple javascript threads in gecko/xulrunner for at least 2 years.
Re:Humiliated By Google's Chrome (Score:3, Insightful)
BE's opposition was based on solving the problem, if there is one, rather than re-architecting the solution on principal.
His position is against the original bug reporter:
Essentially, his objection was that it wasn't solving the problem. This is a different argument - more like whether Google Chrome has a good idea with their protected processes. That's a problem with stability - If the browser handled ALL exceptions intelligently, and watched for runaway scripts, it wouldn't be needed at all.
IE 7's tabs are isolated, and the dev team said they had to jump through hoops to get it to work correctly - adding more complexity, which means more potential points of failure. From the same bug:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=40848#c11 [mozilla.org]
I'm all for deciding what the problem is and finding a solution to fix it - not proposing a new design just to see if we can.
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.
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.
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.
Re:Diamond Joe Quimby: "It Can Be Two Things" (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/get-the-facts/browser-comparison.aspx [microsoft.com]
That link is the only thing I've seen, IE8-wise, comparing it to other browsers. But generally IE doesn't get advertised at all-- I haven't seen an IE ad in ages. (Of course, I don't watch TV, so there's a whole world of advertising I get no exposure to.)
Re:Humiliated By Google's Chrome (Score:3, Funny)
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.
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.)
Re:Processes, processes, processes! (Score:2)
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.
Why a process? Surely a thread would scale better? (Score:2)
Re:Why a process? Surely a thread would scale bett (Score:2, Interesting)
Yup... fashion (Score:2)
Security
Speed ----------- You are here.
Security ----------- The rest of the world is here.
Speed
Need to catch up mate. We'll be getting rid of virtual machines next too.
Re:Why a process? Surely a thread would scale bett (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 some reason, the other processes don't go down, and so the user can (mostly) continue to work. Threads can't do this, because all the threads are still part of a single process.
Re:Why a process? Surely a thread would scale bett (Score:2)
The Microsoft folks don't seem concerned about this, at least not concerned enough to implement it in IE.
It's implemented in IE8.
You mean render threads right?
Re:Why a process? Surely a thread would scale bett (Score:2)
That doesn't solve the stability problem. If one of those worker threads does something naughty, the whole process is going down.
Although process creation time on Windows is slow compared to other OSes its more than fast enough for spawning a process per tab. Chrome and IE8 have already proved this in the real world.
Re:Why a process? Surely a thread would scale bett (Score:2)
Process creation is much cheaper under Windows than it used to be.
And one crashed thread takes out all the threads, resulting in--gasp!--the current situation, as Firefox's tabs are nominally multithreaded.
Process segmentation is the only way to retrofit that bad codebase into actually some sort of working order when compared to IE8 and Chrome. It should also help their astonishing memory leaks too.
Re:Why a process? Surely a thread would scale bett (Score:2)
Forking a process on unix-like systems if fairly lightweight but for Windows this will not scale well at all.
Yeah, cuz multi-process Chrome on Windows is such a piece of shit?
Re:Why a process? Surely a thread would scale bett (Score:2)
Forking a process on unix-like systems if fairly lightweight but for Windows this will not scale well at all.
Yeah, cuz multi-process Chrome on Windows is such a piece of shit?
This is purely anecdotal... but as far as I can tell for my daily usage Chrome is no faster than Firefox 3.5 with adblock. (Adblock ftw)
Re:Why a process? Surely a thread would scale bett (Score:2)
This is purely anecdotal... but as far as I can tell for my daily usage Chrome is no faster than Firefox 3.5 with adblock. (Adblock ftw)
Anecdotal is the best evidence in this case. I've run Chrome with over 90 tabs, and it kept on chugging. And what does speed have to do with a browser being multi-process? The benefits are security and reliability, with the downside being memory usage.
Re:Why a process? Surely a thread would scale bett (Score:3, Insightful)
Forking a process on unix-like systems if fairly lightweight but for Windows this will not scale well at all. Why not just have rendering worker threads? Have I missed something?
Er. This is an argument which applies to high-volume servers that handle hundreds/thousands of requests per second. Windows' process model is not so heavy-weight that you notice it opening a new browser tab once every few minutes.
Re:Why a process? Surely a thread would scale bett (Score:2)
Forking a process on unix-like systems if fairly lightweight but for Windows this will not scale well at all. Why not just have rendering worker threads? Have I missed something?
One of the main reason's threads are more lightweight than processes is because they share an address space (so it's cheaper to switch between threads - you don't need to reload page tables), but the downside of that is that one thread can corrupt another. Processes don't share memory hence they are better isolated from each other.
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)
Re:Nice (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Nice (Score:2)
Re:Nice (Score:5, Informative)
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)
Re:Will this benefit the average user? (Score:3, Informative)
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.
You are vastly over-estimating the impact of a process switch on any hardware from the last decade or more. Right now, my WinXP PC is running 53 processes. If I click another application on my task bar, a full screen has redrawn with the new application's window before my finger has finished releasing the mouse button I clicked. Do you have any idea how many process switches took place in the fraction of a second while that happened?
Better philosophical architecture is a good thing.
There's a lot more than philosophy going on here.
Independent processes allow a dramatic improvement in robustness. Any plug-in, heck even a hostile JavaScript, can take out your entire Firefox browser right now. Plenty of people browse with many windows open doing everything from writing e-mail to posting on social networking sites to watching YouTube. All of that goes boom if a single tab hits a single plug-in/scripting bug.
Independent processes also allow improvements in security. Resources on modern operating systems are typically allocated on a per-process basis; this is the difference between a process and a thread. Avoiding sharing resources between different tabs, where such tabs might contain scripts or plug-ins that you have granted certain extra permissions, is a good thing.
And of course, in practice, many people are now running on multi-core hardware that will benefit in performance terms as well. Moreover, major architectural clean-ups on software projects tend to improve performance as a side-effect anyway.
I'm afraid your post is one long stream of technically incompetent FUD.
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)
Chrome was a success (Score:2)
Whether or not Chrome is adopted and used as a browser, the project was a success in spurring needed innovation.
First Virtualbox SMP support, now this (Score:2, Informative)
Finally, apps are getting more multi-CPU focused. Very cool. All of us with multi processor systems thank you.
What about cookies/isolation? (Score:3, Interesting)
One problem we have is that we want to open many of the same applications more than once. Imagine wanting to login to slashdot with two different logins.
Right now in IE and Firefox each tab shares the same cookie space. So when you login with one tab you'll notice the cookie in the other tab getting "overwritten".
Now with multiple processes is this the case. When one tab "open another window" resutling in another tab are these two tabs in the same processes sharing cookies and the like?
The browser is general is a horrilbe state machine. It would be nice if Javascript would support some form of lighter weight cookie that could be access between page loads.
Re:I love how.. (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...
Re:About time (Score:5, Funny)
This is why we can't have nice things.
Re:About time (Score:2)
Really. And all this wouldn't even be a problem if they just wrote it in Java to begin with.
Exactly, everybody would have stopped using it after the 30th time it crashed the JVM.
Re:About time (Score:2, Funny)
Re:About time (Score:4, Funny)
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.
Re:About time (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
Re:About time (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-facing announcements are made about it to the community, and the wiki page [mozilla.org] is dormant. All the work and focus seems to have been poured into Gecko 1.9.1 (Fx3.5) and now 1.9.2 (Firefox.next).
One element of Eich's vision for Mozilla 2 was implemented in 3.5 – the new faster javascript implementation. But the smaller, leaner, more approachable codebase goal? Who knows.
Now it seems they're attempting 'Electrolysis [mozilla.org]' (the codename for process separation) in parallel to the development of Firefox.next (Gecko 1.9.2), which is already ostensibly being done in parallel to the Mozilla 2 refactoring. Makes you wonder if there's anyone at the wheel.
Here's an essay I wrote about Mozilla's direction [kuro5hin.org] back in 2007 when Mozilla 2 was supposed to kick off.
Re:About time (Score:2)
Re:About time (Score:3, Informative)
> But the smaller, leaner, more approachable codebase goal?
Somewhat. It doesn't get blogged about much, and when it's blogged about the press doesn't pick it up because nitty-gritty arch work is boring. But there have in fact been significant simplifications to all sorts of stuff in the meantime...
The really ambitious "break compat and all" plan for Mozilla2 seems to have been somewhat abandoned for now, though.
continuous improvement (Score:3, Informative)
The idea is/was to do a large scale cleanup and refactoring.
And it's getting done in pieces. Mozilla developers wrote a string of tools (Elsa, Oink, TreeHydra, DeHydra) to analyze the codebase, all open source and some contributing to GCC's rearchitecture to better support plug-ins Developers can then pick specific cleanups and refactoring and identify exactly what code is affected and even do rewrites, though these go through code review. This happens steadily.
DeCOMtamination [mozilla.org] proceeds [mozilla.com]. In each release a few major internal rewrites get in, like the switch to thebes on Cairo and the HTML reflow changes; upcoming is Combined nsImage* & gfxImageFrame [mozilla.org] and the HTML5 parser.
There's no need to wonder when all the development takes place in the open. Pay attention or don't style yourself as an armchair expert.
Re:About time (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.
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.
Re:About time (Score:5, Informative)
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".
Re:About time (Score:3, Interesting)
Let me guess, you are running on ff on ext3? Upgrade to ext4 (or run windows or mac) and the problem is not there.
Re:About time (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:About time (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.
This has nothing to do with multi-core CPUs (Score:2)
I've been doing this exact same work since the mid-90's. Anytime you have a processor intensive or I/O task in a Windows environment, it should be moved off of the primary thread. Even if the process is being run on a single core processor the UI will still be responsive (albeit possibly laggy) while the I/O and calculation is running.
-Rick
Re:About time (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Re:About time (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.
Re:About time (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.
Re:About time (Score:2)
Re:About time (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:About time (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.
Re:About time (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)
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.)
Re:About time (Score:2)
To put it simply, you're arguing that bloat is a user-driven 'feature', and that performance, standards implementation and techinical features like process seperation are 'trivial features'?
Forgive me if I can't take the rest of what you said seriously after that. No wonder IE and Chrome have managed to become better than Firefox so quickly.
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.
Re:About time (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:About time (Score:2)
I also read a discussion once about how it would involve a TON of work to get the extensions working properly again.
Re:About time (Score:2)
I'd be worried how plugins work across multiple processes. Do we run an addon seperately for each process? Do they all load under the firefox process? Can we crash an addon in one process and not have it bring down other processes?
Chrome and IE have the benefit of not dealing with those questions.
Re:About time (Score:2)
I'd be worried how plugins work across multiple processes. Do we run an addon seperately for each process? Do they all load under the firefox process? Can we crash an addon in one process and not have it bring down other processes?
Chrome and IE have the benefit of not dealing with those questions.
Sure, cuz there aren't any real add-ons for Chrome yet that don't involve manually installing them via a rather tedious process.
When Flash crashes in Chrome, it crashes in every tab IN Chrome (though it doesn't take out Chrome itself).
I'd like FF to do this better than Chrome - give me the option to run Flash player in each tab separate from Flash player in every other tab. That'd be nice.
Re:About time (Score:2)
And adding to their reputation as memory hogs...
The memory hogging is a thing of the past as of FF v3.5. It now uses the least memory. It's pretty nice, though Flash seems to have even more problems on this version of FF than before. *sigh*
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.
Re:About time (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:About time (Score:2)
Oh yeah those lazy bastards at Firefox can't make Flash crash nicely.
I really think your anger would be more just if targeted at Adobe.
Oh, I _really_ hate Adobe, make no mistake. But when you make something like a browser, you have to have the brains to know that plugins are a way of life, and you need to make your browser platform not subject to the whims of the incompetent plugin makers. IMO, anyway.
Re:About time (Score:3, Insightful)
So yes, flash can lock up a thread, and since a large amount of firefox users intentionally block flash, its not actually that pressing of a need.
This is based on a particular set of assumption - that all Flash is bad, that all Flash is undesired, and that only unwanted Flash is causing problems. And I'm also not sure what percentage of Flashblock FF users have installed, or how it's configured.
In the days of YouTube, Hulu, etc., Flash content is very much desired, and depending on a plugin to fix a fundamental design weakness in the browser is not the best idea I've heard of.
Just because it's not a pressing need for YOU, doesn't mean it's not a pressing need.
I guess at least you can always talk out your ass now that everyone else is doing it and pretend you knew this all along. Obviously it was your idea.
I've actually been talking about this for _years_, here and elsewhere, along with many others, under this undername. If you wish to waste your time, check up on it. But you should do that before you accuse me of jumping on some bandwagon with no proof.
Re:About time (Score:2)
Now, if only we can get Chrome to have a simple UI for per-site cookie and script preferences, maybe they'll finally add that feature to core Firefox.
Re:About time (Score:2)
When Firefox locks-up in Linux, which process do you kill? Should be fun to issue the kill command to who knows how many Firefox entries just to kill it completely and avoid the "An instance of Firefox is still running" problem.
Re:About time (Score:3, Funny)
That sounds like a job for killall!
Re:About time (Score:2)
It's called copy-on-write technology. It means that 1GB+1GB+1GB+1GB will total about 1.2GB. It's advanced math.
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.
Re:So sad... (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:So sad... (Score:2)
The downside, of course, is that processes generally require more overhead than tabs.
Re:So sad... (Score:2, Funny)
.... said the six digit UID to the seven digit UID.
Re:So sad... (Score:2)
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.
Re:I think I prefer a single process (Score:2)
There shouldn't be too much overhead being most modern OSs use shared code pages and copy on write memory management.
While pages generally do not crash browsers plug-ins do! By launching the plug-ins with the page rendering process the browser should be able to isolate and minimize the impact.
If the engineers design the changes intelligently all the page metadata should remain within the parent process. This greatly simplifies caching and coherency--which they appear to be discussing in the article. The only components that should be pushed into the child processes are things which execute uncontrolled and untrusted content.
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.
Re:I think I prefer a single process (Score:2)
Re:I think I prefer a single process (Score:2)
On *Nix systems, process creation overhead is low enough, and thread cost high enough, that the perf hit will probably be negligible. Problem is, Windows tends to do poorly on process creation, while handling multi-threading fairly well.
In both cases, the costs are seen at creation time (I haven't looked into whether the scheduler for each is optimized for one or the other). This does mean that a multi-tab bookmark (like my 30 webcomic bookmark at home) may start taking noticeably longer to load on Windows machines. Then again, it seems to have slowed down slightly in FF 3.5 anyway (that may be just a UI change though, it's not like I read them all inside of five seconds).
Of course, I'd also like to see browsers and plugins go 64 bit; the built-in nulls in memory addresses make buffer overruns much harder to exploit, and I'd prefer they work on security for a little.
Re:I think I prefer a single process (Score:2)
You've missed many things.
Just because you aren't crashing Firefox doesn't mean that it doesn't still crash very often.
The authentication store is controlled by the master process so other tabs can access it (at least in Chrome, though given Mozilla's determination to fuck up I would not be surprised if they had problems with this).
It only appears to be unnecessary overhead because you don't know what's going on. Try to keep up.