Mozilla Firefox had no major update for a long time now but now looking at the strong competitors succeeding, Mozilla has taken a brand new approach to Firefox which is much more responsive. Firefox sounds better with this new multi-processing approach. Chris Blizzard, Director of Web platform, Mozilla said that they were emphasizing on Firefox’s smoothness to the way the commands are responded to and how would it handle the content.
Blizzard mentioned in a blog post that there are many listed areas on which they are yet to work on. These areas include, memory behavior, multi-core, performance, etc. These are specific areas and they are not in the purview of multi-process work. This surely indicates that Firefox would get much more stable and faster with its release every time. The performance of the interactive multi-page web will even get an improvement. This would not be dependent on multi-process support.
Blizzard continued saying that multi processing would be helpful in managing the memory which is being used. This would help majorly when Twitter, Facebook and Gmail like applications are running as they are the ones where a big chunk of memory is used. Where almost everyone on their laptops and desktop nowadays have multi-core browsers, computing is even moving quickly towards a model which is multi-core. Again such processors are not only in laptops and desktops, but even are now in handsets.
Blizzard said, “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.” The future thoughts revealed that Mozilla is gunning to invest in projects which are of longer horizons to build a browser which would be take up multi-processes.
Talking about the crash protection, it was said that the work for prevention of crashes is even in process. There were many crash reports which used to occur because of plug-in reliability problems. The most crashed plug-in has been of Adobe’s Flash. The crashing problems in Mozilla have started from the time Firefox 3.6.4 was launched. Again it was stated that Flash caused crashing most of the time which led to stability problems for the browser which had an overall impact. Another problem was of course the reliability of the browser which was poorly reflecting.
Containing such crashes is not easy but it is possible that this approach which is of a multi-process can hold them to the content processes. In short it would not be easy only to identify crashes but the diagnosis would even be easy. Content processes have yet another benefit. This would help the user when a crash occurs, it would guide as to on which site the crash had occurred.
Next is the talk about security sandboxing. This would be the ultimate goal for team Mozilla which would mean to add support to content processes on a multiple basis. This is for security purpose. Blizzard even pointed out that there are a few OS which can put any method in a “low rights mode”. This is a point where one has no access to system resources in most of the cases.
It can be concluded saying that Firefox is being completely backed up by Mozilla but its competitors have many strategies already in place which are working good for them.