[classichasclass]

I'm not sure that would necessarily fix the problem definitively. Say you had a browser running web-exposed JavaScript on a thread. You could still finagle a Spectre-type information leak that way by having the JavaScript thread snoop other browser threads, assuming no other mitigations.

[endianswap]

Don't most browsers run one process per page/tab nowadays?

[greglindahl]

Chrome does, Firefox does not (I've got 5 processes for a billion tabs.)

[ComputerGuru]

No, Chrome used to but now uses a heuristic to determine whether new tabs should be launched in their own process or share an existing process, as a memory usage mitigation strategy. I believe tabs from the same origin have a preference of sharing processes.

[valarauca1]

Firefox process per tab is behind a feature flag as it’s in testing still

[timvisee]

I don't think the plan is to ever enable this in the comming few years. The current approach with a few tabs is much more memory efficient, which is why they've chosen it.

[ams6110]

Indeed. I cannot open Google Drive in chrome on my OpenBSD box without crashing the tab from exhausting memory, but Firefox handles it no problem.

[mtgx]

And it's a mistake.

Just recently I noticed that when Firefox loads multiple tabs of the same wordpress site, it starts hanging not unlike Firefox always used to hang. That's likely because it groups all of those same site pages under one process.

I've never experienced that with Chrome. This is why I hope Firefox eventually (ASAP) switches to one process per tab, too. I can handle the browser using an extra GB of RAM. I can't handle it hanging on me and frustrating me.

Instead of pushing for 30-40% lower memory than Chrome, I say they should push for 10% lower memory with the same sanboxed process per tab model.

[Amezarak]

Chrome does not use one process per tab. In fact, it does something very similar to what you say Firefox does.

http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/process-...

FWIW I do not have the problem you describe and I don't want Firefox wasting any more of my scarce memory, or for that matter, CPU.

[girvo]

> I've never experienced that with Chrome

Right, but I doubt that it's for exactly the reason you think it is: Chrome doesn't blindly do "one process per tab" anymore, and hasn't for a bit.

[greglindahl]

So, you're saying because you think you've discovered one case where there might be a problem, Firefox should completely change their architecture? And you're saying this in a discussion which frequently mentions how extremely varied workloads are?

[craftyguy]

The only thing I could find is a set of 'browser.tabs.remote.*' options, that are all enabled by default in FF 60.

That seems to indicate it is enabled, since the old option was 'browser.tabs.remote'? Or has it changed to something else now?

[stormbrew]

In theory marking threads even within the same process as part of a different 'security domain' shouldn't be impossible, though obviously it'd involve proprietary interfaces to the kernel at first.

[krylon]

.Net supports this (at least on Windows), it is called AppDomains: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/framework/app-domain...

[Tepix]

Once operating systems offered this mitigation mechanism, I'm sure browser vendors would use them.