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Mozilla's Project Electrolysis aims to allow tabs and user interfaces to run in separate processes. It has been activated by default in recent nightly builds:
In current versions of desktop Firefox, the entire browser runs in a single operating system process. In particular, the JavaScript that runs the browser UI (also known as "chrome code") runs in the same process as the code in web pages (also known as "content" or "web content"). Future versions of Firefox will run the browser UI in a separate process from web content. In the first iteration of this architecture all browser tabs will run in the same process, and the browser UI will run in a different process. In future iterations, we expect to have more than one content process.
Developer Will Bamberg says the change will bring stability and security improvements. "There are three main reasons for making Firefox run content in a separate process: performance, security, and stability, Bamberg says. "The goal is to reduce 'jank' -- those times when the browser seems to briefly freeze when loading a big page, typing in a form, or scrolling. "In multiprocess Firefox, content processes will be sandboxed. A well-behaved content process won't access the filesystem directly; it will have to ask the main process to perform the request." Bamberg says "well-behaved" content processes needs to access much of the network and file systems. This would be much more restricted under the changes.
Former CEO of Mozilla Brendan Eich has announced a project called WebAssembly that could replace asm.js:
It's by now a cliché that JS has become the assembly language of the Web. Rather, JS is one syntax for a portable and safe machine language, let's say. Today I'm pleased to announce that cross-browser work has begun on WebAssembly, a new intermediate representation for safe code on the Web.
What: WebAssembly, "wasm" for short, .wasm filename suffix, a new binary syntax for low-level safe code, initially co-expressive with asm.js, but in the long run able to diverge from JS's semantics, in order to best serve as common object-level format for multiple source-level programming languages.
Who: A W3C Community Group, the WebAssembly CG, open to all. As you can see from the github logs, WebAssembly has so far been a joint effort among Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, and a few other folks. I'm sorry the work was done via a private github account at first, but that was a temporary measure to help the several big companies reach consensus and buy into the long-term cooperative game that must be played to pull this off.
Original Submission
(Score: 3, Interesting) by K_benzoate on Saturday June 20 2015, @04:25AM
They've actually implemented an internal feature to strip out the worst offending tracking scripts. They're calling it Tracking Protection, and it's available as a toggle in about:config in Firefox 38. It's going to get a proper UI checkbox in the next version. It'll be interesting to see if their blocklist includes Google-Analytics, by far the most ubiquitous tracking script on the web. That would essentially sever any remaining ties and goodwill between Mozilla and Google.
It won't affect me much as I already run Noscript, and Google's tracking domains are blocked by my router, but if Mozilla can push this feature out to a substantial amount of web users that'll be a big improvement. The tracking/advertising business model needs to die, even if it means losing a lot of good sites that can't make their finances work. It just has to happen. The current state is intolerable and incentivizes site owners to wage war against their users' privacy and security.
Climate change is real and primarily caused by human activity.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 20 2015, @08:49AM
Too bad they already fucked up so bad with their 3rd party commercial plugins installed by default and other crap, that i'm looking for a replacement browser. The H264 plugin was the last nail in the coffin and that whatever piece of crap commercial plugin they are going to include is the final blow to that final nail. And i have not forgotten the other crap either. One of the most important ones for me is negleting thunderbird. Mozilla has jumped the shark, and now i just don't see a way back to the future.
As i've said before, i'm testing qupzilla for my needs. What i hope for is the noscript type of plugin to be released soon.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 20 2015, @01:07PM
As i've said before, i'm testing qupzilla for my needs. What i hope for is the noscript type of plugin to be released soon.
I just downloaded qupzilla for OS X. It's clunky, ugly as sin and is missing basic features. The preferences panel can't even be accessed. They've marked the bug fixed at least twice but it still doesn't work. Their excuse is they don't have a Mac to test on, so how can they even claim it's fixed? This looks like a well intentioned amateur project.