F

irefox 48 release marks the biggest change in its history in the form of multiprocess. After spending seven years in development, Firefox 48 is enabling Electrolysis to compete with Google Chrome. With this change, Firefox will gain the ability to run the rendering engines and browser shell as a separate process. Thus, a web page crash won’t be affecting the entire browser.

This delay has been caused due to Mozilla’s very own traditional extension architecture that makes it difficult to separate different processes. So, to enable multi-process in Firefox 48, Mozilla developers had to create a whole new extension system.

Talking of add-ons, Firefox also makes sure that extensions are signed. If an add-on isn’t signed and verified by Mozilla, it simply won’t work.

This rollout of the new feature is taking place in baby steps. In the upcoming days, only a fraction of users will be getting Firefox 48 that’ll have Electrolysis turned on by default. If this rollout is well-received by the users, more people will be able to use this new functionality.

After that initial period, if all looks well, we’ll ramp up to 100% of those users, which will be about half of all Firefox 48 users.

— Mozilla describes.

If you’ve downloaded the latest Firefox 48 web browser, you can check if you are into the Electrolysis group. Just type “about:support” in the address bar and look for “1/1 (Enabled by default)” in the Multiprocess Windows row.

Mozilla 48 also marks the induction of Mozilla’s homegrown Rust programming language. Rust is often considered to give the same level of performance as C++, avoiding the security flaws. So, for the first time, Firefox 48 is shipping with Rust code.

You can download Firefox 48 for Windows, Linux, Mac, and Android by visiting this link.

Did you find this article helpful? Don’t forget to drop your feedback in the comments section below.