Mozilla upgrades Firefox: More processes, please!

Mozilla this week continued its years-long campaign to make Firefox more technologically competitive with the competition, Google's Chrome in particular, by boosting performance, increasing stability and reining in memory consumption.

The open-source developer also patched 31 security vulnerabilities, three of them rated "Critical," the firm's most serious ranking.

Firefox 54, released June 13, expanded on Mozilla's multi-process project, code-named "Electrolysis" (shortened to "e10s"), that since 2009 has tried to mimic Chrome, and separate the browser's operation into more than one CPU process. Previously, Firefox split its user interface (UI) and all content into separate processes -- running all tabs in one of those processes -- to prevent the browser from completely crashing when a website or web app failed. Firefox 54 uses up to four processes to run the browser's tabs, assigning each to one of the CPU buckets.

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