While Google’s Chrome Web browser is still extremely young in terms of development, there are a few areas where it most definitely pushed browser technology forward. One such area is tabbed browsing. As you likely already know, Chrome (and now Internet Explorer 8 as well) treats each open tab as a separate running process. This setup drastically reduces the potential for a browser crash — theoretically, issues with a website open in one tab will not affect other tabs or general browser operation — as well as speeding up performance and going great lengths to improve browser security. As for when we might see the new tab process implementation in a Firefox release, incremental milestones are scheduled throughout 2009 but we likely won’t see full implementation until next year. Mozilla’s post covering process splitting does mention some elements that are currently undecided, such as “taking Chromium’s networking stack to replace Necko” might help speed the release process up a bit, but we don’t mind waiting as long as it’s done right.
[Via The Next Web]
