Mozilla Firefox is one of the most popular web browsers available for all the platforms including Windows, Linux, Mac, iOS, and Android. Until now Firefox has been using only one single process for all its requirements. But now Firefox will adopt a new approach that will separate the browser process from the web content processes and this way run the overall Firefox in multiple processes. This multi-process Firefox feature is being called electrolysis (or e10s in short).
If you are wondering if this is same as the electrolysis that you studied in your high school chemistry, then yes, you are right. Only they are separating binary process (instead of a chemical compound) into multiple processes – and hence the play with 1 and 0 (binary) to call it e10s. The multi-process feature is available in Firefox version 47.0 and above.
Anyway, enabling or disabling the multi-process feature in Firefox is very easy:
- Launch Firefox, click on the hamburger icon (three horizontal lines), and select Options from the panel.
- On the Options screen, select the General tab from the left side.
- Check or uncheck the checkbox Enable multi-process Firefox depending on whether you want to enable or disable the multiple processes in Firefox.
- You will be asked to restarts the Firefox web browser. Choose OK to restart the browser.
- After you have restarted the web browser, it will use the changed electrolysis setting.
The multi-process Firefox is supposed to boost the security and stability of the browser. With the help of multiple processes, Firefox will no longer become unresponsive even if some web pages try to consume a lot of system resources. The security will improve because the multiple processes shall be sandboxed. And even if one process crashes, it will not take down the whole Firefox browser with it.