61–70 of 118 posts
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.
One of the primary reasons I use Firefox is that it uses significantly less memory than Chrome, and the entire OS seems to function better as a result (I've seen the most stark difference on macOS). I had been under the impression that most of the reason Chrome uses so much memory is its multiprocess model.
I understand that maybe we need to give that up for better security, but it would be nice to know if that's indeed the tradeoff being made here.
It would be sad if one day Chromium removed Manifest v2 and there was no alternative.
Can anyone explain the relationship to the Firefox "Electrolysis" initiative better than this[0]? It looks like Electrolysis was just making the browser kernel IPC layer and now Fission is actually divvying up the processes by origin. [0]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Thanks
hi, co-author of the blog post here. There is a more detailed blog post explaining how Site Isolation is better than the Electrolysis architecture here - https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/05/introducing-firefox-new-si... (also linked to from the security blog post). Hope this is helpful!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Chrome's policy is pretty much the same; while it can generate a process-per-tab under most conditions, the guarantee it actually makes (in modern versions of Chrome) is that sites (including different-origin iframes) are isolated into different processes. They use the PSL to determine which sites constitute a different origin, just like Firefox does.
I don't know if "most conditions" is even true. Even when it's only running a handful of processes and I have plenty of ram free I cannot convince it to use more than one process for twitch tabs.
Does this also happen when you type the Twitch URL in a new tab?
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…
If Firefox is still somehow responsive, open about:performance and identify the CPU-hungry tab(s), then close them.
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 mak…
It really depends on what web sites you have open. If you have a single tab with an ad-laden news site, the overhead will be high, but if you have a bunch of Google Docs tabs open, there's no overhead.
This provides more technical details: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/05/introducing-firefox-new-si... >, which should be more interesting to HN than a marketing announcement. In particular, it seems that "site" isn't precisely defined. It seems to be based on domains, but backed by a human-curated list of "sites": https://github.com/publicsuffix/list >. So it's different than Chrome's "every webpage gets a separate p…
That list is the reason why CORS behaves differently e.g. across two subdomains like [subdomain].herokuapp.com (requests are considered cross origin) in comparison with two subdomains of the type [subdomain].[myowndomain.ext] (requests are considered same origin)[1] - the reason for this difference is that herokuapps.com is part of that list.
[1] unless you added your own domain to the public suffix list.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.