5 ms·

I think the main benefit of the multiprocess model is not increased performance on any one website. It is that when a website in one tab decides to calculate pi

I think the main benefit of the multiprocess model is not increased performance on any one website. It is that when a website in one tab decides to calculate pi to a trillion digits, it doesn't bring down the whole browser and all the other tabs along with it.

pcwalton 13y ago
Sure, I agree with that statement. It doesn't square with how I read "Chrome will happily use as many of my 12 cores as it likes", however.
- rcthompson 13y ago
  I read that phrase as "I open as many tabs as I want and Chrome renders them all on different cores." I guess I got that partially from the subsequent mention of Electrolysis as a comparable effort.
acjohnson55 13y ago
Although, does Firefox not use separate threads for each tab? If so, then it would seem like in normal operation, it should be possible to achieve parallelism. Of course, I do still see whole-browser lockups in Firefox, and what I really miss is the ability to actually diagnose misbehaving tabs. Also, I think the Chrome debugger has surpassed Firefox's, especially with the experimental stack traces in asynchronous flows of control.
zobzu 13y ago
right now my firefox uses 49 threads. Guess what? the kernel scheduler run them on all cores. chrome uses 5 processes and 7 threads in 2 processes, 11 threads in another, 1 in nacl helper and 27 in the main process. Guess what? the kernel scheduler also run them on all cores ;-)
blueskin_ 13y ago
That's why you use NoScript. Letting sites run arbitrary local code on your machine whenever they want is suicidal from a security perspective.
- exodust 13y ago
  That's just paranoia. NoScript might be worthwhile 15 years ago, as you browsed 90s porn sites. Today, you're just making your own web browsing life difficult, hoping the "security benefits" of your paranoia outweighs all the broken functionality you'll be constantly making exceptions for, or flat out missing out on because you don't know it's there.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - blueskin_ 13y ago
    I don't consider that much of a loss. Other than that, it means people can't mine bitcoin with my CPUs and power bill, I'm immune to ~90% of browser-only exploits (as opposed to ones in things like flash, PDFs, etc., which I am still far less likely to get hit by than a javascript(flash, etc.)-enabled-by-default user), and a few random and generally non-critical things won't work. Even dropdown menus still work as they are generally done in CSS these days. If a site really needs javascript, I can whitelist it while leaving google tracking scripts, adverts, disqus, etc. disabled.
    - nnq 13y ago
      It's 2014, most sites assume javascript, and the "graceful degradation" is never "graceful". Me and all people doing front-end work I know of, who even care for any kind of "graceful degradation" (that's a minority of front-end-devs!), always go over "the layout breaks and some fonts are wrong for users with javascript disabled" with "but they cans still click the links and read the text, so we'll just leave it this way" (because the alternative will be putting at least 3x as much work into it, and nobody would pay us for it ...just as nobody would pay for a website without "live filtering" and "ajax loading" and all nowadays). So you're basically choosing a stone-age-degraded-experience to be able to spare some CPU cycles. (the security and privacy arguments are valid though, and you're 100% right on these... but as more and more sites become SPAs, you'll basically have no choice than whitelist more and more untill you'll have to whitelist everything)

pcwalton 13y ago

Sure, I agree with that statement. It doesn't square with how I read "Chrome will happily use as many of my 12 cores as it likes", however.

rcthompson 13y ago
I read that phrase as "I open as many tabs as I want and Chrome renders them all on different cores." I guess I got that partially from the subsequent mention of Electrolysis as a comparable effort.

acjohnson55 13y ago

Although, does Firefox not use separate threads for each tab? If so, then it would seem like in normal operation, it should be possible to achieve parallelism. Of course, I do still see whole-browser lockups in Firefox, and what I really miss is the ability to actually diagnose misbehaving tabs. Also, I think the Chrome debugger has surpassed Firefox's, especially with the experimental stack traces in asynchronous flows of control.

zobzu 13y ago

right now my firefox uses 49 threads. Guess what? the kernel scheduler run them on all cores. chrome uses 5 processes and 7 threads in 2 processes, 11 threads in another, 1 in nacl helper and 27 in the main process. Guess what? the kernel scheduler also run them on all cores ;-)

blueskin_ 13y ago

That's why you use NoScript. Letting sites run arbitrary local code on your machine whenever they want is suicidal from a security perspective.

exodust 13y ago
That's just paranoia. NoScript might be worthwhile 15 years ago, as you browsed 90s porn sites. Today, you're just making your own web browsing life difficult, hoping the "security benefits" of your paranoia outweighs all the broken functionality you'll be constantly making exceptions for, or flat out missing out on because you don't know it's there.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- blueskin_ 13y ago
  I don't consider that much of a loss. Other than that, it means people can't mine bitcoin with my CPUs and power bill, I'm immune to ~90% of browser-only exploits (as opposed to ones in things like flash, PDFs, etc., which I am still far less likely to get hit by than a javascript(flash, etc.)-enabled-by-default user), and a few random and generally non-critical things won't work. Even dropdown menus still work as they are generally done in CSS these days. If a site really needs javascript, I can whitelist it while leaving google tracking scripts, adverts, disqus, etc. disabled.
  - nnq 13y ago
    It's 2014, most sites assume javascript, and the "graceful degradation" is never "graceful". Me and all people doing front-end work I know of, who even care for any kind of "graceful degradation" (that's a minority of front-end-devs!), always go over "the layout breaks and some fonts are wrong for users with javascript disabled" with "but they cans still click the links and read the text, so we'll just leave it this way" (because the alternative will be putting at least 3x as much work into it, and nobody would pay us for it ...just as nobody would pay for a website without "live filtering" and "ajax loading" and all nowadays). So you're basically choosing a stone-age-degraded-experience to be able to spare some CPU cycles. (the security and privacy arguments are valid though, and you're 100% right on these... but as more and more sites become SPAs, you'll basically have no choice than whitelist more and more untill you'll have to whitelist everything)