91–100 of 118 posts
How good is Firefox sandboxing these days? Last time I looked it was years behind Chrome's, but site isolation is definitely a step in the right direction. It would be sad if one day Chromium removed Manifest v2 and there was no alternative.
Could anyone here who has been using it report their experience with site isolation turned on? Do you find anything it breaks or makes more difficult? Has it altered your privacy/security practices (in terms of addons, other settings, etc.)?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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…
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…
It's ridiculous to think that a budget laptop with 4 GB of RAM suddenly isn't enough to browse the Web comfortably. All thanks to Meltdown and Spectre.
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.
What's wrong with the web and browsers? It's honestly pretty incredible - we have a system where we can load and execute arbitrary code from any number of third parties near-instantly and it actually works and isn't a complete security disaster. Seems pretty cool tbh
So people imagine splitting off a simpler web, where the main focus is on reading documents, rather than interactive applications, and browsers could be much simpler. But it's pretty hard to see how this could actually work in practice.
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…
I think the overhead is something more like 15MB per process, on Windows. It is higher on other OSes, due in part to the way they load executables. In practice, the total overhead is less bad than you might expect, because people usually don't have that many unique sites open. Telemetry shows that unique sites per tab decreases as the number of tabs increases. It really depends on what web sites you have open. If you…
On the other hand I guess you're right about "people usually don't have that many unique sites open", so the original design value of 100 separate origins was probably purposely chosen to be on the large side, and thinking about it, I guess not having that many unique sites open usually fits my usage patterns, too. The unknown factor I can't really judge is how many iframes with potentially separate origins the pages I normally visit use, though.
Looking at it positively, one additional potential benefit could be that I have a few long-lived tabs that I always keep open – under the current model, this means that the content processes associated with those tabs never die and possibly slowly accumulate cruft and memory fragmentation from additional tabs that happen to be loaded in them (and later closed again).
Under the new model on the other hand, closing all tabs associated with a domain should be enough to get the associated content process to exit and free up really all memory used by those now closed tabs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 portab…
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…
Sadly, process-per-site also means memory usage will skyrocket, which linked post doesn't mention. It's ridiculous to think that a budget laptop with 4 GB of RAM suddenly isn't enough to browse the Web comfortably. All thanks to Meltdown and Spectre.