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Site Isolation in Firefox

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Site Isolation in Firefox

#51

Post by approxim8ion »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #31
nfoz wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Browsers are too big and the web is too complex. Engineering failures all around. As engineers, we should not accept this status quo; we should replace it. We need a new web and new software.

See Gemini and Gopher. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23042424

Gopher is the opposite of new. Gemini is interesting for sure, but it's not an alternative to the web as they fully admit. It's an alternative to a subset of the web. Let's call it the document web. Blogs and articles and so on. But as entertaining as it is, it is a very very small subset.

Re: Site Isolation in Firefox

#52

Post by bastijn »

Offtopic, Mozilla blog articles like the click through more details one aways have the most awesome images. They almost tell the story without a need to read the text. Other one I remember is the one on webassembly [0]. Similar style images.

They really allow you to scroll through the post quickly and see if it is interesting to read in detail.

[0] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/08/webassembly-interface-type...

Re: Site Isolation in Firefox

#53

Post by oblio »

staticassertion wrote: post #49
oblio wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/big_04.html http://www.scottmccloud.com/googlechrome/ In early-mid 2008, I created a comic book for Google explaining the inner workings of their new open source browser Google Chrome. If I'm mixing this up with https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis , that's still 10 years.

Chrome didn't have this until 2018, as the parent link shows. This is not about multi-process architecture. Firefox is < 3 years behind, not 10, not 14.

I was wrong about the actual security policy, but multi-process is still a big security win.

And not so related to this, but from what I've heard about cracking competitions a few while ago, Firefox was not even included, it was considered too easy. Maybe my sources were just bad.

And I say this as a Firefox user for the last decade or more.

Re: Site Isolation in Firefox

#54

Post by pmontra »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #31
nfoz wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Browsers are too big and the web is too complex. Engineering failures all around. As engineers, we should not accept this status quo; we should replace it. We need a new web and new software.

See Gemini and Gopher. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23042424

Gopher is from 1991. I've been using it back then but HTTP won quite easily.

Re: Site Isolation in Firefox

#55

Post by zamadatix »

In case anyone is wondering about the stability I've been running this for a couple of months now and stability has gotten pretty darn good. I'm excited to see it go into stable builds soon.

Re: Site Isolation in Firefox

#56

Post by dmos62 »

gourlaysama wrote: post #9
korethr wrote: post #4

When Chrome was new and shiny, I used it for a time. Then, the first time I found myself needing to kill Chrome because it was completely locked up, I found myself staring at a wall of chrome processes in the task list, not knowing which one I needed to kill. At the time, I thought the idea of a separate process for each tab was silly. Though, with Firefox moving towards this model, I guess the engineers at Google we…

On Firefox you can go to `about:processes`. It lists tabs by process, and includes the PID (on Linux; no idea about other platforms). You can also directly kill tabs and processes from there.

That's super useful on a resource strapped system. Wish I knew this earlier.

Re: Site Isolation in Firefox

#57

Post by sfink »

approxim8ion wrote: post #51
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See Gemini and Gopher. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23042424

Gopher is the opposite of new. Gemini is interesting for sure, but it's not an alternative to the web as they fully admit. It's an alternative to a subset of the web. Let's call it the document web. Blogs and articles and so on. But as entertaining as it is, it is a very very small subset.

That's the point. If you want the web, you need today's browsers. If you want a subset of the web, your "document web" for example, you can get away with something simpler.

Re: Site Isolation in Firefox

#58

Post by cpeterso »

cpeterso wrote: post #17
jzelinskie wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for this link. Not sure how I missed it when it's the very last word, haha. I'm not sure what gave me the impression but, in my mind "process-per-tab" and "Electrolysis" were linked, but that was a misconception: >In great detail, (as of April 2021) Firefox’s parent process launches a fixed number of processes: eight web content processes, up to two additional semi-privileged web content processes, and four ut…

> I'm not sure what gave me the impression but, in my mind "process-per-tab" and "Electrolysis" were linked, but that was a misconception: Your impression was mostly correct. Electrolysis is basically process-per-tab until you reach eight tabs, but after that, tabs start sharing those eight content processes.

Correction to my earlier statement: the initial version of Electrolysis had just one content process (that could be sandboxed apart from the browser parent process), but was soon followed up with "e10s-multi" with multiple content processes.

Re: Site Isolation in Firefox

#59

Post by iggldiggl »

Any news about the memory usage overhead this brings? The original design goal when the work on site isolation started was 1 GB overhead for a browsing session with 100 separate origins (can't remember how many tabs that was supposed to correspond to, although due to iframes it was definitively less than 100 tabs).

Was this goal reached in the end, or perhaps even surpassed, or missed after all?

I guess this also makes adblockers even more valuable in terms of saving memory, since each blocked third party-iframe that doesn't load is potentially one additional process that doesn't have to be created…

Re: Site Isolation in Firefox

#60

Post by MaxBarraclough »

approxim8ion wrote: post #51
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See Gemini and Gopher. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23042424

Gopher is the opposite of new. Gemini is interesting for sure, but it's not an alternative to the web as they fully admit. It's an alternative to a subset of the web. Let's call it the document web. Blogs and articles and so on. But as entertaining as it is, it is a very very small subset.

Respectfully, you're failing to engage with the purpose of the project.

> it's not an alternative to the web

Right. You can't have a lightweight drop-in alternative to the web, pretty much by definition. Any platform capable of everything modern browsers are capable of, is by definition enormously complex.

> it is a very very small subset

That's not a flaw, it's a design goal. It isn't meant to be a half-baked portable GUI toolkit the way the modern web platform is, it's meant to be a simple and minimal format, stable and easy to implement. There are other formats somewhat like this in common usage, like man pages and, of course markdown.

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