Chrome's Process Model Explained

Chrome's Process Model Explained(blog.marcchung.com)

29 points by Trey-Jackson 15 years ago | 8 comments

farlington 15 years ago |

Nice breakdown, but this is a pretty old article (2008). But it's interesting to cross reference with the description here: http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/WebKit2

I'm really curious if webkit2 is going to be widely adopted, and if so, if and how it'll fragment webkit development.

hk9565 15 years ago | |

It shouldn't fragment WebKit development much at all. WebKit2 is just an API layer on top of WebCore, much like the Qt and GTK WebKit API layers. Most of the work is done by WebCore, which is shared by all the API layers.

azakai 15 years ago | | |

> WebKit2 is just an API layer on top of WebCore, much like the Qt and GTK WebKit API layers.

WebKit2 is a very different API than WebKit1, though. For one thing, it is non-blocking, and that necessarily means a lot of changes underneath.

Chrome was built around WebKit1, and it may be clunky to layer it on WebKit2, as it seems unlikely that Google will rewrite/remove Chrome's special multiprocess code and use WebKit2 instead.

So I definitely see some tension between Chrome and Safari here. WebKit2 is multiprocessing for WebKit 'done right', while Chrome's approach was, I suspect, in part done in order to get results quickly (and indeed it got to market far, far before WebKit2).

The duplication of multiprocess code for WebKit is already itself fragmentation in WebKit, which is not surprising given the development model there. But, I expect WebKit to continue to be an excellent project nonetheless.

othermaciej 15 years ago | |

Much of the code is shared with non-multiprocess ports, and many of the leading WebKit ports have been building a WebKit2 port.

It may even lead to more uniformity, if we can share at least some of the approach to multiprocess with Chromium.

swah 15 years ago |

[2008]