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by higherpurpose 4145 days ago
Actually my main problem with Firefox is that if it "chokes" on one tab, I can't use the whole browser until that fixes itself. In Chrome I generally have 20+ tabs open and I don't have any issues.

Firefox needs to get itself a multi-process system. I really don't mind a little extra RAM being used as long as tabs are separated and sandboxed. I'm also looking forward to a complete rewrite in Rust. That should make Firefox much faster than anything else out there. Hopefully sooner rather than later.

1 comments

lol. You really think a new programming language will increase speed?! Rust is not faster as C++ for sure.
Actually re-writing things might make it faster.
yes we have enough proof of that concept... I do not believe you. It's a urban myth that rewriting always make things faster. Especially when looking at a C(++) code basis. Rust will maybe make the code safer but I doubt it will make it faster.
Improving the design is part of a rewrite, which would make it faster, even if the rewrite was in C++. Sufficiently large, old projects (and Firefox certainly qualifies) tend to accumulate a lot of gunk and design choices that used to make sense, but don't any more.

Rust also allows one to safely use patterns that one couldn't use in C++ without screwing things up, thanks to the borrow checker. And quite a lot of Firefox is written in Javascript, which definitely would be faster when rewritten in a compiled language.