Disabling hardware acceleration (it's in the General tab of the Advanced pref pane) seems to have solved the horrible problems I was having with Firefox 7. Thanks!
On the article - What Mozilla are doing first with Electrolysis is like WebKit2, rather than like Chrome which is almost-but-not-there-yet process per-domain which will come later. There was also some original research which went into Firefox 4 with per-compartment garbage collection.
They're also looking at a multi-threaded DOM in Rust.
In case anyone hasn't been keeping up with it, Flash was already sandboxed months ago, before Chrome implemented it (this is different from Out Of Process Plug-ins).
I recommend you disable the Google Updater plug-in which takes up memory and doesn't really do much of value considering it shouldn't be in Firefox in the first place. NoScript has a click-to-play for Flash built-in so if you're using Flashblock get rid of it because it conflicts with NoScript.
Chrome's flag for sandboxing plugins dates back to before the code was open-sourced: http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/chrome/commo... (search for "safe-plugins"). The reason it was never on by default for Flash is that you can't sandbox Flash without breaking Flash functionality. How did Firefox solve this problem?
You could help out coding Haiku OS (www.haiku-os.org) which is an x86 clean-room open source continuation of the once commercial BeOS being developed by a committed team. The emphasis is on native code, fast, lightweight and being super-responsive. You can have 10 videos playing at once (I don't know how much, but it's designed to never block a user's actions) and it doesn't bat an eye. It has binary compatibility with BeOS and new apps are being created for it all the time (avoiding the chicken-and-egg problem). There is a variety of them (some open sourced professional apps). It is not UNIX-like, but it has POSIX compatibility. Haiku has a journaling-file system which is fast and supports user-definable attributes (Be engineers brought a subset of it to Apple with them developing Spotlight and Microsoft had been working on a similar feature). Stack and Tile (haikuos.info/video/stack-and-tile.html) is a cool windows management feature unique because of tabs for window titles. The OS API is said to be the simplest and a joy to use.
Some of the languages available:
C,
C++,
Python,
Ruby,
Perl,
Lua,
Haskell,
Scheme,
Squirrel,
Yabasic,
bash (comes with a bash shell),
zsh
Some of the developer tools available:
Paladin (its own IDE), Git, Hg (Mercurial), GNU Compiler Collection, Vim, QEMU, Bochs
Some of the technologies used:
Multi-process WebKit browser,
OpenGL,
OpenAL,
SDL and Qt libraries,
Gutenprint and CUPS for printing,
FreeBSD network drivers,
Haiku Vector Icon Format
On the way:
An ARM port,
Clang with the already working LLVM,
OpenJDK,
Gallium3D,
package management,
more language bindings for the API
Included below is ways to contact, lessons and software sources:
That sounds like a really cool idea. :) Do you have plans to release it? This combined with Ruby on Arduino (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2774170) could make a nice combination. Anyway good luck on your project.
App Tabs,
In-content UI (like preferences in a tab),
HTML/CSS/JS extension model and about:labs (proof on Aza Raskin's blog)
These are just a few things Google has copied from Mozilla. I don't go around complaining about all the thing Google has copied from Mozilla, but the record has to be set straight, Mozilla is not following Google, they are going there own way. They implemented sandboxed Flash first and compartments which Chrome is missing.
Funny that Google haven't updated the Google toolbar.
"It doesn't take a conscious effort to make software incompatible. All you have to do is not work too hard at fixing bugs—which, if you're a big company, you produce in copious quantities. The situation is analogous to the writing of "literary theorists." Most don't try to be obscure; they just don't make an effort to be clear. It wouldn't pay." - Paul Graham
http://paulgraham.com/microsoft.html
There is no politics. Simply put, the developer who first wrote it worked at Mozilla, Firefox's tools aren't designed to replace Firebug and Mozilla coordinated releases with the Firebug team. So many negatives assumptions and unsupported claims when it comes to Firefox, if people wouldn't be so insular they would know what they are talking about.
TechCrunch isn't really a good indication of browser market share, the type of user is more likely to use Chrome (usually sticks with the defaults even if they use extensions).
Also I'm not sure early adopters is a good description, Firefox users are more likely to care about usability, security, privacy, extensions that aren't possible with Chrome or that Google considers not important or don't want it (something like NoScript or RefControl) and open source (which Chrome is not, sure Chromium is but the distinction is important because of real world implications and other reasons). These things do tend to be more important for some early adopters, I'm not sure I'd grant "technical proficiency" to mere "tech enthusiast".
It's also true that users have moved to Firefox from Chrome, being that for example depending on the metric Firefox is faster, but mostly the same speed. QEMU in javascript is a good example of a real world example where Firefox's javascript engine doubled Chrome's speed or thereabouts.
Disable: Google Updater Google Toolbar FlashBlock if you have NoScript