Firefox Playing Catch Up

Firefox lags far behind both Google Chrome and IE8 when it comes to multithreading support. Mozilla has laid out plans to implement multithreading into Firefox over the next two years.

The first phase called “Bootstrap” is set to be completed this July. In addition to the obvious effect of increasing speed multithreading support will also improve stability. Currently when one tab crashes it takes the whole browser down with it. When the changes are implemented each tab will run on its own thread, so if one tab takes a dive the others shouldn’t be effected.

Mozilla might even do away with its own network library API (Necko) and instead use the open source networking stack currently integrated with Google Chrome.

I was sort of surprised when I found out that Firefox was so far behind on this issue. It has been touted by many for years as being more innovative than its rivals. After all, Firefox was the first to implement mouse gestures. Oh wait… That was Opera. But what about being the first browser to support some features of HTML 5 and CSS 3. Hmmm…No…That was Safari. Oh well…Better late than never.