Mozilla Firefox Expands Sandboxing Features To Improve Performance And Security

 

As we all know very well that Mozilla Firefox is one of the wide used web browsers. Currently, it does not allow the feature of sandbox technology but now it has decided to add this feature into Firefox to improve the stability, security, and performance of the web browser.

Do you know what is the meaning of Sandboxing?

Sandboxing is regarded as a most important security measure because it has the ability to prevent an exploit from abusing a vulnerability which provides the direct access to the entire PC. In the last year, this browser revived its Electrolysis (e10s) project which uses multiple processes for the browser instead of a single one. This feature has multiple benefits, a single tab cannot crash your entire web browser. By using the multiple processes, it makes possibility to separate the processes for sandboxes for the web content and performance should increase. The reason behind this, multiple processes can use the multiple cores. Sandboxing is really a well-known technique which separates the operations that handle the dangerous content from outside the main application’s process.

Most of the System users might worry that sandboxes feature to increase the memory usage of the browsers but according to the Firefox this is not a case. While the multiple processes have the larger memory footprint, a recent test version show the consumption of memory usage increases 10-20%. According to the Mozilla Firefox browser, this is still half the consuming memory of Chrome on the same web page.

The developers of Firefox browser feels that if the core browsers, each new tab, and the content contains malicious extensions like JavaScript having their own process which reduce the browser’s performance speed. In 2015, Firefox started switching to a new extension system that opened the door to a multi-process design.

In the first stage, Firefox moves to the multi-process which involves separating the web browser shell from single rendering process. In the Mozilla Firefox 48 feature was enabled for the small number of users who used no any extensions. The developers of this browser are not made their extensions as explicitly multi-process compatible. Firefox 51 covers all extensions except those that are explicitly marked as incompatible.

 

Even with the limited modifications made in Firefox 50, the responsiveness of web browsers has improved by 400% due to a separation between the renderer and browser shell. It has more to do to meet the parity with other web browsers. Especially, Firefox 50 includes the first iteration of sandbox for the rendering process. The up gradation of Firefox has been coming from a long time but when both pieces of the work are complete, it offers the same kind of protection and design as other browsers.

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