Firefox - Site Isolation

[WereCat]

Source:

https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2021/05/18/introducing-site-isolation-in-firefox/

 

 

 

When two major vulnerabilities known as Meltdown and Spectre were disclosed by security researchers in early 2018, Firefox promptly added security mitigations to keep you safe.

 

This fundamental redesign of Firefox’s Security architecture extends current security mechanisms by creating operating system process-level boundaries for all sites loaded in Firefox for Desktop. Isolating each site into a separate operating system process makes it even harder for malicious sites to read another site’s secret or private data.

 

 

This seems to be a great step forward in a webrowser security. 

I honestly don't know how exactly it will work, to me it reminds me to be some kind of sandboxing feature where for example a java script from one tab now won't be able to get your browsing information from another tab. 

But as I said, I'm not sure if it will work exactly this way. 

 

Anyways, I wonder if it will have a big impact on RAM usage or performance in general. 

[captain_to_fire]

So how is this different from Google Chrome’s sandboxing? A feature that existed since 2008? 
 

Spoiler

 

[Arika]

19 minutes ago, captain_to_fire said:

So how is this different from Google Chrome’s sandboxing? A feature that existed since 2008?

Given that Firefox has also had sandboxing for quite some time, there does appear to be a difference if they are making an announcement about it, i'm just not smart enough to understand what it is.

 

because of the wording they used, what i THINK they mean is that instead of having child processes

 

each site/tab will be given it's own main/parent process

[RejZoR]

You can also enable Fission using my Firefox Tweaker tool (under Security Tweaks):

https://rejzor.wordpress.com/firefox-tweaker/

 

It's a bit easier to manage than digging through clumsy about:config

[dilpickle]

I just turned it on and it disabled the Back button. I guess that counts as site isolation.

[BachChain]

I distinctly remember years ago Mozilla said they wanted to avoid doing this because it was one of the primary reasons Chrome used so much memory