What can be learnt from Chrome

[Jeff <web kiddo free fr>]

I remember being pretty excited when I read Google's explanatory comic on Chrome, regarding one specific thing: they decided that 1 tab = 1 system process [1].

I remember being often told that Epiphany's memory leaks and generic performance problems were caused by Gecko/XULrunner.

Now, with the switch to Webkit, could it be considered to take this approach, one process per tab? That way, if a website causes it to crash, only the tab crashes, not the whole browser, and also, if there is a horrible memory leak, it disappears when the culprit tab is closed.

I personally still have to "killall epiphany-browser && epiphany-browser" once in a while to free memory that should already be free. I just did that with my laptop, which was swapping for no good reason (switching between various windows?!). After killing and resurrecting epiphany, the system is fast again.

And while I was typing up this email, it occured to me that maybe someone already had filed a bug. So I went to b.g.o. and found bug 553193 [2], which was actually reported by... me. It did not get any replies, so I guess sending this mail to the mailing list might be the only way to get your opinions on this matter.

[1]: http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/big_06.html
[2]: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=553193