Browsers

[HiddenKnowledge]

From: this site.

I appreciate the goal here, improvements in the following areas: performance, stability, security. However, I’m still not sold on this design. I realize that this has become the trendy new thing now that Google is doing it (yes, I know there was talk of this well before Chrome came out but it wasn’t until it was released that this really got a high priority). However, I feel like they had to do this initially because they were so crash happy.

I feel like the overhead of an entire process (startup time and memory usage) would suggest that this model would actually have the opposite effect on the performance. This is probably more true on Windows than other platforms. I’m imagining an average computer user that is viewing the task manager trying to understand why their machine is running so slowly and seeing a bunch of Firefox processes running. I suppose it would be neat if there was an easy way to identity which process was driving a particular page so a user could find pages causing trouble, but this probably wouldn’t be easy to determine from task manager. It also seems like this problem (identifying troublesome pages) could be tackled in the current architecture.

Regarding stability, Firefox crashes on me so rarely (maybe twice this past year). Session restore works fine for recovering from this.

Anyways, I’m sure all of this has been thought out previously and I imagine tons of performance metrics will be collected to prove me wrong so I’m probably just overly cautious. That being said, are there any plans on maintaining the current single process model once this feature is implemented? :)

That is pretty much my reason. :)