Comment Re:Rendering (Score 1) 441
We're doing as much as we can to reduce those problems while Firefox is still single-process. For example, we recently started throttling timers in background tabs and added a sane web animation API. More and more internal APIs are asynchronous or interruptible. We've also reduced memory use quite a bit with Firefox 7; I think we use significantly less memory than Chrome in common cases now.
At the same time, we're also working on process separation. It looks like it will be ready to play with, perhaps even an option, in a few months. I don't think we'll enable it by default until we're comfortable with the tradeoff between memory use and responsiveness/stability.
And we're also working on a new programming language that could make it safe and sane to use "tasks" (likely mapping to threads) rather than processes, so we don't have to deal with that unhappy tradeoff