WebKit2 promises more stable, more secure browsing

Stephen Withers
Monday, 12 April 2010 13:00

Business IT - Open Source

Work is underway on WebKit2, a successor to the WebKit framework behind Apple's Safari browser and other applications. One of the main changes is to run web content in a separate process to the application user interface.

The nature of a web browser has changed considerably from Tim Berners-Lee's original concept of a program to fetch, display and navigate through hyperlinked text.

In particular, plug-ins and JavaScript mean individual pages may 'run' in a browser, rather than being statically displayed. When something is running, there's potential for a crash.

With traditional browser architectures, a crash in one page may bring the entire browser to a halt. And if the entire browser is running as one process, there's more chance that malware authors will be able to exploit flaws to the extent of taking over the entire system.

Running multiple processes also makes it easier to take advantage of multicore CPUs.

So there's been a move towards using separate processes for overall stability, security and performance. A prime example is Google's Chrome browser, though Internet Explorer 8 uses a similar approach, and a future version of Firefox 3.6 will be able to restart the Flash, QuickTime or Silverlight plug-ins if necessary - without affecting the rest of the program.

So why not just reuse the work already done for Chrome? See page 2.