For a long while now (even before Google Chrome was announced), Mozilla has been examining ways to make Firefox better by splitting the work of displaying web pages up among multiple processes. There are several possible benefits of using multiple processes:

Increased stability: if a plugin or webpage tries to use all the processor, memory, or even crashes, a process can isolate that bad behavior from the rest of the browser.

Performance: By splitting work up among multiple processes, the browser can make use of multiple processor cores available on modern desktop computers and the next generation of mobile processors. The user interface can also be more responsive because it doesn’t need to block on long-running web page activities.

Security: If the operating system can run a process with lower privileges, the browser can isolate web pages from the rest of the computer, making it harder for attackers to infect a computer.

Now that we’re basically done with Firefox 3.5 we’ve formed a project team. We’re calling the project “Electrolysis”. Because we can’t do everything at once, we are currently focusing on performance and stability; using a security sandbox will be implemented after the initial release. Details of the plan are available on the Mozilla wiki, but the outline is simple:

Sprint as fast as possible to get basic code working, running simple testcase plugins and content tabs in a separate process. Fix the brokenness introduced in step one: shared networking, document navigation and link targeting, context menus and other UI functions, focus, drag and drop, and probably many other aspects of the code will need modifications. Many of these tasks can be performed in parallel by multiple people. Profile for performance, and fix extension compatibility to the extent possible. Ship!

We’re currently in the middle of stage one: Ben Turner and Chris Jones have borrowed the IPC message-passing and setup code from Chromium. We even have some very simple plugins loading across the process boundary! Most of the team is in Mountain View this week and we’re sprinting to see if we can implement a very basic tab in a separate process today and tomorrow.

For the moment we’re focusing on Windows and Linux, because the team is most familiar and comfortable on these environments. I sat down with Josh Aas on Friday and we discussed some of the unknowns/difficulties faced on mac. As soon as our initial sprint produces working code we’d love to have help from interested mac hackers!

If you’re interested in helping, or just lurking to see what’s going on, the Electrolysis team is using the #content channel on IRC and the mozilla.dev.tech.dom newsgroup for technical discussions and progress updates. We’ll also cross-post important status updates to mozilla.dev.platform.

If you’ve emailed me volunteering to help and I haven’t gotten back to you, I apologize! Until we get the stage-one sprint done there aren’t really any self-contained tasks which can be done in parallel.