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Mozilla working on multicore-friendly Firefox build

by on11 May 2009

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More responsiveness, security, overall stability


Mozilla is currently working on a new implementation of its popular web browser that will allow it to run individual segments of the entire program over the span of several processes at a time. The goal is to provide a stable and more efficient load structure and a higher level of security, all while making more use of those idle CPU cores we have sitting around in our machines.

The project, coordinated by Mozilla expert Benjamin Smedberg, consists of four or more development phases, with the first scheduled to be completed this summer on July 15th. Phase I highlights the initial bootstrap concept that will be hacked together fairly quickly, consisting of a simplistic page with a URL bar. Phase II will focus more with interactions between the user interface and web content and is aimed for November.

Early next year, we can expect Phase III to come around, which focus on adapting the APIs for extensibility, accessibility, and performance. This is speculated to be the first usable release. Phase IV will wrap up the majority of the development process and extend the previous development to support several content processes at a time.

Time will tell what we can expect from this interesting Firefox project. Perhaps we may even see the start of a multi-process web browser competition among big players that could even light some ideas for GPGPU implementations. All in all, we won’t have to dream anymore about hardware efficient web browsing once this project begins to mature.

Last modified on 11 May 2009
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