Mozilla Firefox will bring security solutions with Project Fission. One tab in your browser can cause the whole browser to crash, but for some time now both Chrome and Firefox have been trying to prevent this from happening. In Chrome, we’ve been enjoying ‘site isolation’ for two years now, and now that option is finally coming to Firefox.
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Project Fission is an initiative that Mozilla launched some time ago and now it is starting to be available in the preliminary versions of the browser’s ‘Nightly’ channel. The feature adds not only this isolation in terms of resources but also greater security against possible attacks originating from any website: these attacks will now be much more difficult to affect other processes or system resources.
Mozilla Firefox will bring security solutions with Project Fission. There are advantages in security but also there’s a disadvantage, this feature causes greater memory consumption. The feature arrived in Google Chrome in mid-2018 when the browser launched its version 67. It was theoretically going to be deployed as part of Chrome’s security improvements but ended up serving as a protection measure against the Spectre vulnerability that affected Intel and AMD processors.
This feature worked great with Google and Mozilla announced in February 2019 that they also want to implement it in Firefox, and they launched Project Fission.
The problem is that this option is very complex to integrate: the Google and Mozilla teams have invested almost two years in its implementation, in which it has been necessary for engineers and developers to rewrite part of the code that defines the internal architecture of these browsers.
This option is already available to be activated in the preliminary versions of Firefox Nightly. It is expected that the option will be available in the standard version of the browser in the first half of 2021, and for that in Mozilla have contacted the developers of extensions to be prepared.
Mozilla Firefox will bring security solutions with Project Fission. Although this option adds isolation that protects us from attacks through websites, there is a clear disadvantage: it increases the amount of memory used by the browser. Firefox developers are trying to reduce this additional consumption.
