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Site Isolation in Firefox

blog.mozilla.org

81–90 of 118 posts

Re: Site Isolation in Firefox

#81
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…

[deleted]

Re: Site Isolation in Firefox

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shift+Esc brings out Chrome task manager where you can kill individual tabs/pages by name.

Does this work when Chrome is locked up? Usually people go to Task Manager because it's unresponsive.

Chrome does not "lock up", at-least on Windows without extensions. Individual tabs may crash or lock up, but the rest of the interface hasn't done that for a many years.

Re: Site Isolation in Firefox

#83
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.

Site Isolation launched in Chrome in 2018, but the work started in earnest in 2012 -- see the below check-in. The idea in Chrome dated to before the Chrome 1.0 launch; it was the subject of Charlie Reis's PhD dissertation and he interned on Chrome pre-public launch.

https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/c6f2e67ab40...

Site isolation proved to be the biggest refactor in Chrome's history, and was one of the motivating reasons for the webkit/blink fork. Making site isolation work touched a huge host of features, since handling iframes out of process has a way of making simple things incredibly complicated.

The example I always gave was: imagine how the "find text in page" browser feature would be implemented. With the entire document in-process, it was a simple for loop. With the document and its subframes sharded across multiple processes, it is now a distributed search problem that requires handling of out-of-order results and stitching them into a traversal order. What's more, to achieve Chrome's security goals, you want to avoid introducing functionality that would allow the [presumed-compromised] process of the outer document to query the contents of the inner document via the find in page feature. So you can't simply do this as a peer-to-peer query between the renderer processes; it needs to be coordinated by the main browser process.

Congrats to the Firefox team on this milestone.

Re: Site Isolation in Firefox

#84

This is fantastic work that will greatly improve the security of Firefox; big thanks to those who have worked on it. Is there data on what effect it will have on memory use? 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 th…

Yes, more processes come with the cost of more memory but we have reducing the process overhead in Firefox in order to minimize that cost as much as possible. We will continue doing memory reductions and will have numbers to report when we roll-out to all our users. Thank you for your continued support and use of Firefox.

Re: Site Isolation in Firefox

#85

Does anyone else get ANNOYED by the UI of Mozilla's blog on mobile? Looking at the navbar, the horizontal and vertical alignment is all over the place, the search input has no placeholder or label, background colors are inconsistent, and paddings are just bizarre.

It's garbage. The new tab button doesn't follow the status bar to the top of the screen so unless you like it on the bottom you can't browse one-handed given the giant stretch between opening the tab manager and opening a new tab.

Not to mention the fact the extension ecosystem is still crippled. There's still no user-agent switcher, meaning there are sites I literally cannot access from my phone without installing an old version of Firefox Mobile or go back to using Dolphin Browser. "View Desktop Version" perversely still tells sites you're on a mobile browser.

Re: Site Isolation in Firefox

#86
post #80
post #37

This is really interesting. Prior to this, Firefox's isolation model was much weaker than Chrome's due to only having a pool of 8 content processes. If I'm reading the technical blog correctly [1], this will move to a process-per-site model without also doing process-per-tab as Chrome does, i.e. if you have several tabs open on the same site, they'd be in the same process. This seems much less resource intensive than…

Complementary to this, one can use the Temporary Containers addon to get isolation of e.g. cookies. I've set it up to run one container per domain, and it works really well. I hope they merge this into Firefox at some point.

I ended up having to disable my containers plugin due to syncing issues and later...CPU usage. It wasnt terrible on a better processor (like 1-2 cores 50-100% consistent usage) but on my old core2duo thinkpad it was basically useless. And on any laptop that was unacceptable.

I like the idea of containers, and will probably revisit periodically to see if whatever was fubar on my account is resolved (theres none/if any logging, so its hard to really dig in)

Re: Site Isolation in Firefox

#87
post #37

This is really interesting. Prior to this, Firefox's isolation model was much weaker than Chrome's due to only having a pool of 8 content processes. If I'm reading the technical blog correctly [1], this will move to a process-per-site model without also doing process-per-tab as Chrome does, i.e. if you have several tabs open on the same site, they'd be in the same process. This seems much less resource intensive than…

> process-per-tab as Chrome does This is a common misconception. Chrome doesn't technically do process-per-tab. Chrome's model can most succinctly be described as process-per-domain, although even then, there are rare instances where two tabs opened on different domains will actually share the same process.

It’s a misconception that Google fostered right from the start.

They did advertise Chrome as process-per-tab: https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/big_04.html, pages 6 and 7 also definitely agree. (I haven’t read all through it again now, but I should also note that the process in the very centre of https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/big_38.html shows what appears to be two tabs under it, which supports it not necessarily being process-per-tab.)

But either it never actually was, or they abandoned it as impractical even before release (https://stackoverflow.com/q/42804 has answers agreeing it isn’t process-per-tab on the day after the first release). So either Google lied, or they released the comic including a glaring and rather significant factual error (even if it had been true when Scott first drew the pages).

It’s frustrating when parties pull these shenanigans, making big claims around things like security and performance predicated on points that are simply not true, but never retracting those points properly or repudiating them, so that the misconception persists.

Re: Site Isolation in Firefox

#88
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…

not a direct resolution but i do use OneTab

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/onetab/

to offload idle tabs. Downside is that it doesnt sync with firefox so anyhing i may need I may need to open in another firefox instance, I just bookmark.

The grouping is nice because it gives me a reference of a time i was doing x research/reading. And what i find is that there really isnt too much that i need to crossover, work stuff stays on my work computer, personal to personal etc.

Re: Site Isolation in Firefox

#89
post #52

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...

Thank you for the positive feedback.

Re: Site Isolation in Firefox

#90
post #24
post #19

Software is hard. Chrome had this in 2008. Firefox had to be rearchitected 14 years for this.

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.

A recent post about that:

https://dustri.org/b/the-web-browser-im-dreaming-of.html

Gemini might be a good replacement for the web:

https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

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