Comparing Firefox Browser with Google Chrome
What is google chrome ?
Chrome is a free Internet browser officially released by Google on December 11, 2008. Its features include synchronization with Google services and accounts, tabbed browsing, and automatic translation and spell check of web pages. It also features an integrated address bar/search bar, called the omnibox.
What is Firefox?
Firefox is one of the best browsers out there on the market, and it’s free. Firefox was created by Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross as an experimental branch of the Mozilla browser, first released as Firefox 1.0 on November 9, 2004.Through the unique development methods of Open Source, they are able to make a product with impressive speed and less bugs than programs developed by traditional methods. Mozilla Firefox has a number of unique features, and it is overall a good product.
What are processes?
Simply a process is an executing program. Each process provides the resources needed to execute the program.Any process is controlled by its process control block. That block contains information such as process priority, process id, process state, CPU, register etc. A sub process of a process is called child process.
What are threads?
A thread is an entity within a process that can be scheduled for execution. That means a process can have multiple threads. A thread have 3 states: running, ready, and blocked. All threads of a process share its virtual address space and system resources. A thread is lightweight and can be managed independently by schedulers. It helps to improve the performance by using parallelism.
The benefit of multi-process architecture in Chrome
Earlier, I mentioned Chrome uses multiple renderer process. In the most simple case, you can imagine each tab has its own renderer process. Let’s say you have 3 tabs open and each tab is run by an independent renderer process. If one tab becomes unresponsive, then you can close the unresponsive tab and move on while keeping other tabs alive. If all tabs are running on one process, when one tab becomes unresponsive, all the tabs are unresponsive. That’s sad.
How web browsers use process & Threads, which is faster firefox or chrome and how?
Google’s has released its own open-source browser, Chrome, in direct competition to Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer.Chrome in Searching With Google Chrome & Omnibox and Greg speculated on its future in How Bright Is The Outlook For Chrome?. Both compared Google’s new browser to the incumbents, Firefox and Internet Explorer. But Chrome is actually very different from those two browsers, and significantly different from nearly everything else on the market. Here are the 10 major features that truly differentiate Google Chrome from the competition.
Chrom uses concepts of process. Each tab in firefox acts as process. And thus ’n’ number of tabs will spawn n number of processes in chrome.Firefox uses threads, which means context switching is faster.
chrome uses multiprocessing and firefox uses multi threading. so each tab in chrome is a process whereas in firefox each tab is a thread. since multithreading is faster, firefox is faster(due to shared memory, context switching is faster in threads).however, it is important to note that, chrome is less likely to crash since if one tab(process) crashes, it won’t crash the entire browser. opposite is true in case of firefox.
Features That Differentiate Google’s Chrome From Firefox
1. It’s being built from the ground up. The Google engineers involved understood that modern day web browsing is about applications and rich media, which normal browsers are not built for, so they started from scratch.
2. Well, not entirely. Chrome is being built on WebKit, the basis of Apple’s Safari browser and the browser in the Google Android mobile platform, and using Google Gears, a web applications plug-in/platform.
3. To deal with the new types of demands users make of web browsers, Chrome will use multi-processing to handle all those demands, giving each element of a page (a JavaScript Command, a Flash video) its own memory and process, instead of the single-threading architecture used by today’s browsers. Multi-threading should make Chrome faster and more secure.
4. New tabs, above the address bar, will handle those different processes. So JavaScript threads will be in one tab and a video in another, allowing each to load simultaneously, reducing memory load, and ensuring that one bug in a page doesn’t crash the whole site (or whole browser), just that tab.
5. To make things even faster, Chrome will use a new JavaScript Virtual Machine from Denmark called V8.
6. Still not fast enough? Chrome’s Task Manager will function like Windows Task Manager, and allow you to find processes (even plug-ins) that are hogging resources or crashing, and just kill that process. No more closing tabs when the browser slows down; now you can go straight to the problem.
7. OK, faster? Chrome’s Omnibox can help. When you start typing in the address bar, Chrome offers suggestions to autocomplete your request–and not just based on your history and bookmarks like Firefox does, but also based on the most popular web sites as calculated by Google. You can even search a site from the address bar by typing a site name and hitting tab.
8. This one is on par with IE8 and the newest version of Firefox: a privacy mode, where you can browse without anything from the session being written to your computer–no cache, no history, no cookies, nothing.
9. Convenience is further advanced by a personalized home page with screenshots of the pages you visit most.
10. It’s extra secure; the browser includes Google’s ever-growing list of spyware and malware sites, and every tab is “sandboxed,” which means whatever happens in the tabs can’t affect your computer. (No more need to download Sandboxie). And no more pop-ups, not even JavaScript ones. Every pop-up is contained in the tab in starts in, collected as a small link on the bottom of the page. You can drag it off the page to see it, but it won’t pop up without your permission.
