Hacker News Reader

Comment by pwhelan | Hacker News Reader

I could see them forking to manage threads and processes differently. Tabs are managed by thread in Firefox whereas by process in Chrome. I prefer the look & feel of Firefox, which is why I use it, but when Firefox crashes (usually because of a plug-in) the whole thing goes down, not just that page. Not a trivial change, but certainly worth trying out imho. It would likely win back market share too.

View on HN

Tabs aren't threaded in Mozilla. All tabs are managed by a single thread, and are cooperatively multitasked. And it sucks, since for example, one webpage doing a frequent setTimeout can adversely affect others. They've talked about moving to the Chrome model, but they don't seem to have the resources to do so in a timely manner.

A lot of what their doing is catch up to Chrome. They sat around not really innovating in a way that's really meaningful to a normal user for a long time.

The next minor update, 3.6.4, will have out-of-process plugins.

Not what I meant. "The Mozilla platform will use separate processes to display the browser UI, web content, and plugins." [1] -- I don't like this idea myself as it creates odd inter-process communication. Each tab thread will need to contact the UI, web content, and plugin thread. To me, it makes more sense to have each tab be its own process.

Threads don't provide a real advantage here. The executable is loaded once as the OS is smart enough to share the binary, common libraries are loaded once (using mmap), both processes and threads need their own stacks. However, by splitting loads as they have, if any of those 3 main processes fail, everything dies.

1.) https://wiki.mozilla.org/Content_Processes

Reply on news.ycombinator.com