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Comment by mbrubeck | Hacker News Reader

Note that out-of-process plugins are not available for Mac OS X yet. (That's coming in a future release.) And Firefox does not yet have full process separation like Chrome, but that is coming via the https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis project (which will appear this year in Fennec 2.0, and then in the next release of Firefox after version 4.0).

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There are two reasons why I use chromium (not Chrome) over Firefox.

     Chromium has true process separation.
     Chromium is faster for boot/page loads/JavaScript.

Splitting up plugins like this is chipping away at the first reason why I don't use Firefox. I would really like to use Fx, but chromium is just "better" for what I want in a browser.

Come on Firefox, win me back!

I'm not well aware about chrome process separation. So please educate me.

I thought Chrome gives a separate process per each tab. So for example if flash crashes in a given page the whole page should crash. But in Firefox way this shouldn't happen. Am I wrong?

I only started to use chrome recently so I don't have much experience with it either.

Chrome has a process per tab and runs entirely separate processes for each plugin. So if flash crashes, the page does not crash. There is only one flash process serving the whole browser though, so if flash crashes, flash content on all open tabs stops working. The new Firefox plugin implementation works the same way.

I'm not sure what definition of 'full' means separating the chrome and content - but that's what Electrolysis does. As far as separation of plugins by process - this is full in every sense of the word.

It's not full, it's literally whitelisted to only kick in for Flash, Quicktime, and Silverlight.

I thought we were talking about whether it was fully separated. Silly English and its ambiguity.

Yes, it does not separate EVERY plugin. But it separates them completely into another process.

Sorry, I should have been more specific. I just meant that Firefox 3.6.4 has less process separation than Chrome, since we only separate plugins while Chrome also has separate processes for content.

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