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posted by janrinok on Saturday June 20 2015, @01:43AM   Printer-friendly
from the still-trying dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 20 2015, @05:18AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 20 2015, @05:18AM (#198548)

    Ask Google how it likes Oracle to cash in on Java APIs. Ask Microsoft how it liked their lawsuit about Java. Javascript is at least now owned by patent-happy yobbos.
    That said, I utterly despise javascript, but it is the language of the most portable, universal VM -- browsers. Seriously, JVM is not half as popular as a VM as browsers. As far as I recall, the best trick of asm.js is that it was implemented in such a way, that it could even run on older browsers, which weren't built to support it.
    As for peak iOS... no, just no. Apple has rabid and vendor-locked in fans. I'm not saying it's a bad product, but they have a nice, stable target.

  • (Score: 2) by jmorris on Saturday June 20 2015, @06:48AM

    by jmorris (4844) on Saturday June 20 2015, @06:48AM (#198562)

    Ask Google how it likes Oracle to cash in on Java APIs.

    A good point but those lawsuits look to have quieted down of late. And I think they were mostly fits of rage because Google only kinda used Java (Dalvik) and cut Oracle out of the game.

    As for peak iOS... no, just no. Apple has rabid and vendor-locked in fans.

    They hover at 20% now, when the next billion smartphones come online (finally replacing featurephones) across the world do you really think very many of them are going to run iOS? So where do you see their growth opportunity? Because when I do the math a stable base of locked in users in a market rapidly growing at the bottom end means a drop in market share. Everybody in the 1st world who wants one already has one, only upgrades are going to be happening for them so plenty of insanely great margins for Apple but no increase in installed base. A few newly rich in China are grabbing them now that they have competitive sized screens but how many are grabbing the super cheap China only handsets for every iPhone sold there? Don't be deceived by the fact 'everybody you know' has an iPhone. You probably live in the 1st world and more than likely in a big city, for example in the U.S. Apple still commands a 40% share and in the big cities probably even more. But the world is a big place and mostly far too poor to buy Apple's luxury goods. Unlike designer fashions, there ain't no bootleg Apple for sale at the flea markets of the world.

    The very last argument for Apple was that developers made more money in the Apple store because of the greater average wealth of their users and their greater willingness to spend money on apps and in-app purchases but even that is no longer true; quantity has a quality of its own. And once apps appear first on Android and eventually make their way to iOS all of the assumptions change.

    • (Score: 1) by Pino P on Saturday June 20 2015, @02:41PM

      by Pino P (4721) on Saturday June 20 2015, @02:41PM (#198687) Journal

      Ask Google how it likes Oracle to cash in on Java APIs.

      A good point but those lawsuits look to have quieted down of late.

      That's because last time I checked Google was waiting to hear whether the Supreme Court of the United States will take up API copyrightability. See the most recent briefs [eff.org]. If not, it has to go back to the district court for a ruling on whether use of an API is a fair use.

      when the next billion smartphones come online (finally replacing featurephones) across the world

      The last time I checked, carriers made it tricky [slashdot.org] to use a smartphone without automatically getting a data plan added at an additional cost of hundreds of USD extra per year. Or is this sort of "cramming" forbidden in the countries where "the next billion smartphones" are expected to come into use?

      Unlike designer fashions, there ain't no bootleg Apple for sale at the flea markets of the world.

      Apple alleges in Apple v. Samsung [wikipedia.org] that Android itself is "bootleg Apple".

      The very last argument for Apple was that developers made more money in the Apple store because of the greater average wealth of their users and their greater willingness to spend money on apps and in-app purchases but even that is no longer true

      The perception started when Google hadn't yet begun to process payments in all countries were devices were being sold [stackexchange.com]. But if a shift in buying habits has occurred since then, I'm interested in reading more about it. When and to what extent has this changed?