Mozilla Firefox to get multi-processing support

With the competition getting speedier, Mozilla is now working harder on making its Firefox more responsive with a multi-processing approach. Mozilla's director of Web platform Chris Blizzard said their emphasis will on how smoothly Firefox responds to commands, and how it handles content. "There are several areas listed ... performance, multi-core, memory behaviour, etc. For each of these areas there’s still a lot of work to do outside of the scope of the multi-process work. What this means is that every release of Firefox will get faster, more stable and has better multi-web page interactive performance even if it doesn’t include support for multi-process. But we know that in order to get across some hurdles we’re going to need to invest in multi-process model," he said in a blog post. Blizzard said multi-processing has advantages in memory management, especially where big web applications "like Gmail, Facebook and Twitter" take up large amounts of memory. He also noted computing is quickly moving to a multi-core model, where basically everyone now has a multi-core browser on their desktop or laptop. Even multi-core processors are starting to show up in mobile devices as well, he added. "So one of the easiest ways to take advantage of multiple processors is to have each DOM (document object model) assigned to its own processor, and the easiest way to do that is to have a few processes that can each be assigned to their own CPU," he said. Blizzard said Mozilla is investing in "longer-horizon" projects in building a multi-process browser. Crash protection Blizzard said Mozilla is also working on protection from crashes, starting as early as Firefox 3.6.4, mainly due to the reliability problems of plugins, particularly Adobe's Flash. "Crashes in Flash were causing overall browser stability problems, and reflecting poorly on Firefox’s perceived reliability," he said. But he said a multi-processing approach can contain crashes to the content processes. The crashes will also be easier to identify, easier to diagnose and don’t take down the entire browser, he added. "There’s also another nice benefit to having content processes. When there’s a crash, it’s much easier to tell what site caused the crash. In a single-process model, you can guess based on all of the sites that a person has open, but it could be any of them, and you have to look at a large sample of data and correlate sites to crash signatures to see patterns in the data. With a single tab (or small group of tabs) the number of sites is reduced so the crash can be more easily identified," he said. Security sandboxing Blizzard said the last goal for adding support for multiple content processes to Firefox is for security. He noted some operating systems can put a process into a “low rights mode" where they cannot access much system resources. "This means that even if there is a security problem in a content process, that the amount of damage that content process can do is limited to what the sandbox allows," he said. While this system is imperfect and cannot protect one website from another malicious website, he said this is a "positive step forward, and is well-worth the investment." — TJD, GMA News