Each Firefox Tab To Get A Separate Process
June 22nd, 2009 • Featured, Software
Mozilla are currently working on implementing separate processes for each open tab in Firefox to enhance reliability and security.
Separate processes for individual tabs is nothing new in the browsing industry since the introduction of Google’s Chrome late last year. This has since been copied by Microsoft in Internet Explorer 8, which was released not too long ago. Mozilla is now playing catch-up and is in the process of bringing this feature across to Firefox – but there’s a catch. They’re going to implement separate processes for both Linux and Mac as well, which has been Google’s main excuse for the seemingly slow port of Chrome to operating systems other than Windows.
The main advantage of separate process is that if something causes a tab to crash, only that tab will close, leaving the rest of the other tabs and browsers open and operating as if nothing happened. So you won’t lose all 72 open tabs if something goes wrong in one of them. Separate processes also ensure performance improvements, allowing a user to run and (if need be) close a tab which is displaying a resource-hungry or badly coded website, which means only that website being rendered by that tab will be slowed down instead of the entire browser.
“Electrolysis”, as it’s been called by Mozilla devs, is currently in active development, to the point where they have a video of a working example, and is expected to be available to the public for active use before the end of July.
[via DownloadSquad]
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3 Responses (Add Your Comment)
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Man, THANK GOD! That’s so awesome, no more total crashes when people have badly encoded flash in some tab I’m not even looking at! (I hope
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“Separate processes for individual tabs is nothing new in the browsing industry since the introduction of Google’s Chrome late last year. This has since been copied by Microsoft in Internet Explorer 8, which was released not too long ago.”
Get your facts and your history straight. IE introduced process per tab months before Google even announced Chrome. It was Chrome that copied IE, not the other way around.