This provides more technical details: <<a href="https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/05/introducing-firefox-new-site-isolation-security-architecture/" rel="nofollow">https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/05/introducing-firefox-new-si...</a>>, which should be more interesting to HN than a marketing announcement.<p>In particular, it seems that "site" isn't precisely defined. It seems to be based on domains, but backed by a human-curated list of "sites": <<a href="https://github.com/publicsuffix/list" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/publicsuffix/list</a>>.<p>So it's different than Chrome's "every webpage gets a separate process".
This is really interesting. Prior to this, Firefox's isolation model was much weaker than Chrome's due to only having a pool of 8 content processes. If I'm reading the technical blog correctly [1], this will move to a process-per-site model without also doing process-per-tab as Chrome does, i.e. if you have several tabs open on the same site, they'd be in the same process. This seems much less resource intensive than Chrome's model while still delivering similar security properties.<p>[1] <a href="https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/05/introducing-firefox-new-site-isolation-security-architecture/" rel="nofollow">https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/05/introducing-firefox-new-si...</a>
When Chrome was new and shiny, I used it for a time. Then, the first time I found myself needing to kill Chrome because it was completely locked up, I found myself staring at a wall of chrome processes in the task list, not knowing which one I needed to kill. At the time, I thought the idea of a separate process for each tab was silly. Though, with Firefox moving towards this model, I guess the engineers at Google were prescient in the correctness of that tradeoff.<p>I do use a lot of tabs, so I fear I'm going to find myself facing the same problem I faced with Chrome: a site misbehaves and locks things up, crap, which process do I kill? A way of tracking which tab maps to which process would be nice, so the next time I trip over a badly-coded page, I don't have to kill everything just to get my browser to respond again. Lazyweb question to y'all: is there a feature in Chrome or Firefox that can do this (mapping tab/page -> process), or have I just stumbled upon a side-project idea?
Offtopic, Mozilla blog articles like the click through more details one aways have the most awesome images. They almost tell the story without a need to read the text. Other one I remember is the one on webassembly [0]. Similar style images.<p>They really allow you to scroll through the post quickly and see if it is interesting to read in detail.<p>[0] <a href="https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/08/webassembly-interface-types/" rel="nofollow">https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/08/webassembly-interface-type...</a>
Can anyone explain the relationship to the Firefox "Electrolysis" initiative better than this[0]? It looks like Electrolysis was just making the browser kernel <> IPC layer and now Fission is actually divvying up the processes by origin.<p>[0]: <a href="https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Thanks" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Thanks</a>
Any news about the memory usage overhead this brings? The original design goal when the work on site isolation started was 1 GB overhead for a browsing session with 100 separate origins (can't remember how many tabs that was supposed to correspond to, although due to iframes it was definitively less than 100 tabs).<p>Was this goal reached in the end, or perhaps even surpassed, or missed after all?<p>I guess this also makes adblockers even more valuable in terms of saving memory, since each blocked third party-iframe that doesn't load is potentially one additional process that doesn't have to be created…
In case anyone is wondering about the stability I've been running this for a couple of months now and stability has gotten pretty darn good. I'm excited to see it go into stable builds soon.
This is fantastic work that will greatly improve the security of Firefox; big thanks to those who have worked on it. Is there data on what effect it will have on memory use?<p>One of the primary reasons I use Firefox is that it uses significantly less memory than Chrome, and the entire OS seems to function better as a result (I've seen the most stark difference on macOS). I had been under the impression that most of the reason Chrome uses so much memory is its multiprocess model.<p>I understand that maybe we need to give that up for better security, but it would be nice to know if that's indeed the tradeoff being made here.
Does anyone else get ANNOYED by the UI of Mozilla's blog on mobile?<p>Looking at the navbar, the horizontal and vertical alignment is all over the place, the search input has no placeholder or label, background colors are inconsistent, and paddings are just bizarre.
Could anyone here who has been using it report their experience with site isolation turned on? Do you find anything it breaks or makes more difficult? Has it altered your privacy/security practices (in terms of addons, other settings, etc.)?
How good is Firefox sandboxing these days? Last time I looked it was years behind Chrome's, but site isolation is definitely a step in the right direction.<p>It would be sad if one day Chromium removed Manifest v2 and there was no alternative.
Does anyone remember Firesomething? The extension that randomized the name of Firefox to OceanMonkey, WaterHorse, FlameTiger, etc? Powerful extensions and much better UI are the main reasons so many of us switched to Firefox back in the early 2000s.