[scotty79]

> Chrome pioneered moving each tab to a separate process with full sandbox isolation.

I don't think it was done for security. Before chrome where all tabs ran in single process it was common for a bad site to stall your whole browser. Separating it into single processes was basically admission that, yes, web browser sucks, so the best we can do is give you ability to kill a part of it when it misbehaves.

[josephg]

It was done for both reasons. Here's the Google Chrome comic book talking about it:

https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/small_04.html

Another benefit they cite is reduced memory fragmentation. Because each tab lives in its own memory space, when the tab closes the OS can reclaim all of its memory. Presumably you'd still get framentation, but the OS is probably better able to handle that long term than jemalloc. Clever!