Posts Tagged ‘mozilla’
Good news for Mozilla Firefox users!
Mozilla looks towards a multi-threaded Firefox release
Mozilla, having recently launched Firefox 5, has said that it is working to bring multi-process content support to Firefox. As for what this will bring to the web browser, Mozilla said that it aims to create a smoother, more responsive user experience with fewer pauses.
In a blog post, Mozilla outlined what it thinks Firefox responsiveness means. The outfit said, “At a basic level we’re talking about making sure that the main [user interface] of the browser isn’t away from the mainloop for more than fifty milliseconds. We’ve made great strides here, and Firefox 5 is a great browser from a responsiveness standpoint. But we know that if we want to separate chrome and content concerns that we’re going to have to go to multi-process.”
Mozilla was in the headlines in the past fortnight after it was revealed that the Aurora build of Firefox will be sporting more frequent garbage collection. However in this blog, Mozilla says that the cost of garbage collection goes up as the heap size increases.
That is not too surprising as essentially it acknowledges that the garbage collector has more to scan. What this ultimately means to the user, said Mozilla, are pauses to the user interface and what the outfit wants to do is “to make sure that garbage collection for pages doesn’t really affect the main [user interface]“.