“One of the key new features that the Lorentz branch of Firefox 3.6 will aim to include is a technology that rival browser Google Chrome helped to popularize – out of process plugins. With out of process plugins, browser plugins like Flash are sandboxed and isolated by the browser. The official project name at Mozilla for the effort is called Electrolysis.”
I didn’t know the new about:support command existed. Since browsers are becoming more and more like an launchpad for applications a task manager really is important. I guess this will be a big part in Electrolysis.
Can’t wait until the add more info in there like memory usage.
Edited 2010-01-28 00:25 UTC
If you go to the wiki page the aims of the project are very high – hopefully by the time 4.0 comes out that all the aims are reached or otherwise it’ll be so far behind Chrome and Safari it would have reached joke status. People don’t want their tab to bring down the whole browser let alone a plugin – time for Firefox developers to get their act together.
How many times has Firefox crashed in your usage? I always run the latest nightlies and am running a beta of flash and I use a lot of extensions. Still I only get crashes when a version of the nightlies is broken.
I think there is a small minority that has a lot of crashes that think that process separation will solve it.
It’s not just about crashes, but how some foo’d plugin in one tab can freeze the whole browser, as an example.
Either way, it needs to catch up.
There is a difference between separate plugins and separate processes per tab. The current Firefox nightlies have plugin seperation: http://benjamin.smedbergs.us/blog/2010-01-27/multi-process-plugins-… And this will be backported to a 3.6.x release.
I run Mac OS X so the reliability may vary based on platform but with that being said – yes it does crash, hang and so forth however I do feel that many of these issues are related to plugins and thus need to be isolated off from the browser. There is also the benefit of separating these components – so that when I do close a tab, the memory is instantly reclaimed rather than the current situation of it hogging memory even after all the tabs have been closed off.
Process separation may feature better memory releasing characteristics when closing tabs but as long as you keep a lot of tabs open with no intention of closing them anytime soon (e.g. web applications) Chrome uses a lot more memory than any other browser currently. Lifehacker actually did a few quick tests comparing Chrome 4 and Firefox 3.6 and Chrome’s memory usage is not pretty. I am intentionally not judging whether the trade-offs (e.g. performance, stability) are worth it or not, it’s just that Chrome users may be well advised to be careful when talking about other browsers memory usage.
http://lifehacker.com/5457242/browser-speed-tests-firefox-36-chrome…
Edited 2010-01-28 12:42 UTC
What OS are you using. I used to have *a lot* of crashes with FF 3.5 on Snow Leopard, and 95% of the time it was when browsing a page that used Flash (the other 5% of the time it was a page that used Java). Sounds like a process separation issue to me….
“Behind Safari”??? Safari doesn’t do process separation and it’s touted performance over Firefox 3.5 doesn’t make up for the lack of add-ons on Windows, in my opinion.
On the other hand, I was very impressed with the latest Chrome and its available plugins. Finally, I might be tempted away from FF as my primary browser.
Chrome process options are very cool – I usually run with the –process-per-site to keep memory usage down.
As far as I’m concerned, Firefox is and always has been ahead of Safari and I’m using Mac OS X versions primarily. Chrome, even as a beta version, is quite good, but we’ll see how it performs when it has a few years on it.
Chrome has moved Safari out of my way, except that I should keep it since Apple embeds the browser choice within it.
Getting the plug-ins from bringing down the browser could have been done quite a while back but nothing else pushes people the way competition does.
About damn time. It is so amazingly idiotic to merge everything into the same process. My locally installed mplayer flawlessly plays not only flv and ogg but also h264. I don’t f–king care what Mozilla supports, I don’t *want* them to support video codecs *at* *all*.
And btw, you can extend this to other areas: SSL can be an external service, same as png/jpeg renderers.
And please, those of you who are still using the chrome interface please don’t argue about performance.
Does it come with electrolytes?
No, but the browser textures are much smoother.
I have been using Firefox since it was Phoenix 0.4. I haven’t had a problem with it up until a few months ago. It started crashing while browsing flash sites. Not every flash site, but a lot of them. I hate flash. I haven’t used every browser in the world but I’ve tried a lot of them and Chromium has been the only one that doesn’t crash with these flash sites. So I think this is a good idea for Firefox. And if other browsers want to compete it would be good to keep up with at least this. I really didn’t want to make the switch. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that someday in the near future somebody better than I will make all this internet flash content disappear. I’d like to point out I’ve only had a problem with the flash plugin that comes from Adobe and no other plugin.
0.3 here. I’ve seen Firefox behave retarded, if you run Windows and have limited RAM and then FF uses enough that Windows needs to swap then things turn to dumb.
I’ve not used Windows in a while. On Debian (not stable) flash is still a dick, I currently get videos with unusable controls. I know that’s nothing to do with Firefox but it is annoying, it’s 2010 ffs.
Edited 2010-01-29 07:28 UTC
I develop flash apps for a living. My debugging process alone crashes the entire chrome browser at least twice a day. I probably have to kill all the chrome processes another 2-3 times a day because they are all hung. So please tell me again – what are the benefits of out of process plug-ins?
Perhaps you should file bug reports with Google – this sounds serious and well worth fixing.
My guess is that it is a problem with Flash. Flash has a great concept (at least as long as it’s not used for video), but the implementation is incredibly terrible.
I could be wrong though, it might be a problem with Chrome.
That’s kinda funny, as video is the only thing many (most?) people need it for, me included. But yes, it sucks for that purpose, and I’d really like to see it replaced with something better.