Although Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome browsers are increasingly competitive, they soon will have one technical issue in common: one out-of-control Web page won’t force you to shut your entire application. The feature is known as the “split process model,” but mortals have a more-easily grasped image: the sandbox.
As part of updating the open source WebKit to “WebKit2,” Apple’s Safari (along with Google Chrome, the Android Web browser and Palm’s WebOS) will essentially provide a separate process for each tab.
“WebKit2 is designed from the ground up to support a split process model, where the Web content (JavaScript, HTML, layout, etc.) lives in a separate process,” explains Anders Carlsson, who helped develop Safari as well as WebKit. This means each tab opened is essentially a separate browser, thus allowing run-away Web content to live in a “sandbox” that won’t interfere with others.
Although Google’s Chrome uses WebKit, the update is slightly different. “The major difference being that we have built the process split model directly into the framework, allowing other clients to use it,” Carlsson said. Instead of Chrome limiting the function to its browser, WebKit2 will make the process feature available to other browsers.
[via AppleInsider]
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
