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Comment by ch0wn | Hacker News Reader

I'd happily accept a bigger memory consumption in exchange for threaded/multi-process tabs. Does anyone know how the current state of that project is? The main reason that keeps me with Chrome is that in Chrome a single tab's JavaScript going mad doesn't affect any other part of the browser, while Firefox still completely freezes.

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Mozilla's multi-processing project is called Electrolysis[1], and the process-per-tab variant is used in mobile versions of Firefox. I think it's pretty far off for the desktop version, and as long as blue sky ideas go, I'd prefer to get the security advantages without the increased memory consumption (maybe with shared heaps within a privilege level, whether or not multiple processes are used).

As far as increased responsiveness, that's addressed by the Snappy effort, which you can follow here[2] as a sort of sister-blog to Nicholas' MemShrink reports.

[1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis

[2] https://blog.mozilla.org/tglek/

The multi-threading is proceeding on a few fronts. The project to run chrome and content on separate threads, "super-snappy", is going to have nightly builds soon. The bug is here:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=718121

Off main thread compositing and image decoding are in progress too. After those are done the "electrolysis" project to have separate process for tabs and addons will probably resume.

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