Firefox seems to be following the Chrome’s way. Apparently, Mozilla has launched a new project, which is codenamed “Electrolysis” that is aiming to follow the Chrome’s multiprocess orientation. Over the years, Mozilla has always made Firefox to run as a single process, leading to which, if even a single tab would fail, the entire browser would crash, leading to loss of valuable data. With 3.5 out, a lot of bugs have been discovered as well, so a complete revamp is quite the solution to this.

According to Mozilla’s developer’s team, bifurcation of the page rendering workload into various multiple process threads should improve the overall performance of the browser, leading to lesser crashes and/or freezes. Not only would it help faster browsing, it should help in tightening the security as well as increasing the stability of the browser at the same time. The developers have already come up with a prototype of this “separate-process-per-tab” idea and should be out in testing soon enough. This prototype basically does the same thing as Google’s Chrome does as of now, that is to open each tab as a separate process. The only downfall for this is, if you’re on a netbook using low physical memory resources, it might slow the machine down.

This idea of multiprocessing has been adhered to by Mozilla in the past, but it didn’t get quite the required thumbs-up from the Firefox Developer community, till Google actually implemented it on Chrome. The success in the latter’s use of the multiprocessing led to Mozilla to give it a re-think and revaluation. Google not only provides multiprocessing, but also includes a fancy familiar taskbar (as seen in the Windows OS), which gives a low-down on the current tabs and the statistics regarding those very same tabs. Hopefully, Mozilla should embrace the same in it’s future upgrades. Till then, stick to Chrome..

For TechMirage,
Pranav Shirodkar