Multi Process Firefox Demonstrated

By | June 22, 2009


Chris Pitchin has posted a video which demonstrates Firefox multi process feature.

As he explains: there are two Firefox programs running instead of one: Firefox itself, and gecko-iframe. The second program is new: it’s drawing the web pages to the screen. When I kill -9 this gecko-iframe, the “tab” containing mozilla.com. To the non-geeky, invoking kill -9 on a program causes it to crash IMMEDIATELY. Notice that only the “content” disappears when the page crashes; the user interface itself keeps running as if nothing happened.

cjones also wrote:

We don’t even have a guess for when this will be releasable. However, we’ll likely have limited-function, bleeding-edge development builds available “soon,” maybe in a few months. We’d love to have your help, even if it’s limited to pre-alpha testing!

Thanks to Nox for sending this.

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About (Author Profile)


Vygantas is a former web designer whose projects are used by companies such as AMD, NVIDIA and departed Westood Studios. Being passionate about software, Vygantas began his journalism career back in 2007 when he founded FavBrowser.com. Having said that, he is also an adrenaline junkie who enjoys good books, fitness activities and Forex trading.

Comments (1)

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  1. Foo says:

    More info about project Electrolysis:

    The team is on track to the targeted mid-July release of a very early implementation that should do exactly this. Electrolysis uses the IPC message-passing and setup code from Chromium (the open source code base for Chrome) which, like Internet Explorer 8 have a multi-process architecture.

    From Mozilla Links:
    http://mozillalinks.org/wp/2009/06/first-results-of-electrolysis-multi-process-firefox/