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0 pointslxgr1y ago0 comments

Browsers are incredibly complex, and moving them to an IPC model is not easy. Essentially, you need to ensure "same process like", performant JavaScript interoperability in some cases, often (but not always) due to backwards compatibility.

Firefox has shared a lot about their efforts in moving there. If you're curious, there are a lot of blog posts and internal design docs under their project name "Project Fission".

But yeah, the fact that both Chrome and Firefox have managed to do so does leave Apple looking slightly bad here.

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tails4e1y ago

How often do tabs really need to communicate, and when they do, does it really need to be as fast as possible. I would say slower and secure would be a better design philosophy, especially as tab interaction is generally rare, and low bandwidth

junon1y ago

We already have this with (iirc) postMessage API.

lxgrOP1y ago

That API is exactly one of the reasons Safari still runs some distinct origin sites in the same process together.

Performantly implementing that API across processes is possible, but not quite trivial.

brucehoult1y ago

popup-based authentication does not actually need high performance.

lxgrOP1y ago

It's not used only for authentication, and figuring out what a website is trying to do heuristically doesn't sound easy either (although I believe Chrome on Android does just that, and enforces a site-locked process when they deem it important for security reasons).

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

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tails4e1y ago

junon1y ago

We already have this with (iirc) postMessage API.

lxgrOP1y ago

That API is exactly one of the reasons Safari still runs some distinct origin sites in the same process together.

Performantly implementing that API across processes is possible, but not quite trivial.

brucehoult1y ago

popup-based authentication does not actually need high performance.

lxgrOP1y ago

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse