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Site Isolation in Firefox

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Site Isolation in Firefox

#11

Post by nly »

yakubin wrote: post #6

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…

They've been using the public suffix list for scoping cookies for ages. It's an important list

Re: Site Isolation in Firefox

#12

Post by ocdtrekkie »

pspdrome wrote: post #10
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…

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.

Re: Site Isolation in Firefox

#13

Post by pmontra »

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…

I gave it a try. I opened a new tab to a random website, then went to about:memory

Scrolling down I found a section starting with

> web (pid 1036080)

> Explicit Allocations

> 108.27 MB (100.0%) -- explicit

> ├───45.04 MB (41.60%) -- window-objects/top(https://www.that-random.site/, id=175)

I try to kill that process now, but I post this message first in case I kill the whole browser.

Result: the tab crashed, the browser survived.

> Gah. Your tab just crashed.

> We can help!

> Choose Restore This Tab to reload the page.

Restore did work.

Re: Site Isolation in Firefox

#14

Post by JonathonW »

yakubin wrote: post #6

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…

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.

Re: Site Isolation in Firefox

#15

Post by jdlyga »

Does anyone remember Firesomething? The extension that randomized the name of Firefox to OceanMonkey, WaterHorse, FlameTiger, etc? Powerful extensions and much better UI are the main reasons so many of us switched to Firefox back in the early 2000s.

Re: Site Isolation in Firefox

#16

Post by gostsamo »

annyg wrote: post #3
jzelinskie wrote: post #2

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!

Hi, I'm a blind user and I'm just dropping to say a big thank you for the excellent alt text to the diagrams in the hacks post.

Thanks for the browser work as well!

Re: Site Isolation in Firefox

#17

Post by cpeterso »

jzelinskie wrote: post #7
annyg wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

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.

Re: Site Isolation in Firefox

#20

Post by hutrdvnj »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #12
pspdrome wrote: post #10

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.

It works when 1..n of your tabs are frozen, but the UI is still responsive e.g. you are still able to switch to other tabs. If your chrome is completely frozen i.e. you can't even open the chrome task manager, then you usually have to restart the browser.
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