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Firefox

Almost 7 years agone, Mozilla announced that information technology would begin implementing a new multiprocess-capable version of its popular browser. Now, information technology'southward finally ready to start rolling that adequacy out to its users, though only slowly at first. Equally of this writing, Firefox's multi-process implementation (dubbed Electrolysis, aka e10s), volition roll out to a select group of beta users testing Firefox 48. If the initial testers notice no bug, the feature will be enabled on more than and more systems, until information technology debuts in Firefox 48 in roughly 6 weeks.

Here's how Mozilla describes its ain characteristic implementation.

Similar to how chemists can utilize the technique chosen electrolysis to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, we're using project Electrolysis to separate Firefox into a UI procedure and a content process. Splitting UI from content ways that when a web page is devouring your computer's processor, your tabs and buttons and menus won't lock up likewise…

This is a huge change for Firefox, the largest we've ever shipped… As noted earlier, this is just the offset phase. Next up we'll be working to become E10S to the cohorts not eligible in Firefox 48. Nosotros want 100% of our release users to do good from this massive improvement. After that, nosotros'll exist working on support for multiple content processes. With that foundation in place, the next projects are sandboxing for security, and isolating extensions into their own processes.

Adding multi-processing

Chrome, Cyberspace Explorer, and Edge have all used multi-process sandboxing for tabs for years. In this model, each browser tab is independent from the other. The upside to this approach is that a unmarried slow-running tab can't lock upwardly the entire system, and it allows each tab to be independently sandboxed from the others. I of the downsides is that this requires more memory on a per-tab basis, which is why Chrome has sometimes been criticized for being a RAM squealer.

Multiple Firefox processes

Firefox multi-processor implementation (artist's depiction)

Unfortunately, Firefox wasn't designed to implement each tab as its ain independent process, and adding this adequacy required the team to rearchitect significant chunks of the browser to be compatible with this new approach. Electrolysis won't implement multi-procedure back up in a single leap — instead, all pages will exist in i thread, while the UI is spun off to a unlike thread. This should yet alleviate some of the stutters and slowdowns you see from FF when the browser has many tabs open up. Whether or not it completely alleviates the problem is all the same an open question; I regularly encounter Firefox's RAM usage balloon upward to ii-4GB, only to collapse back downwardly to 1/x that size when I open and close the browser. (Turning off all add-ons and running in Safe Mode doesn't fix the issue.)

The long-term goal of Electrolysis is nevertheless to create a browser with per-tab isolation, only information technology's not clear when Mozilla volition hit that target. Evolution on Electrolysis stopped for several years, while the company attacked other depression-hanging fruit to improve responsiveness and performance, just the need to rebuild the browser from the ground up has also delayed the rollout.

Electrolysis should be faster and more responsive once FF48 debuts, but whether it'll help stem Mozilla'due south market place share turn down is another question altogether.

StatCounter1

Data from Statcounter shows that Firefox's market place share has been trending downwards, as has IE/Edge. While the refuse looks modest over only the last few months, Firefox has been slowly bleeding market place share for years — according to Statcounter, its June 2022 marketplace share was 19.6%, compared with just 15.6% this April. IE and Edge have also been dropping off, despite Microsoft'due south efforts to push users towards Windows 10.

If you want more than information on Electrolysis and the rationale behind the program, these links should exist of use.