In the newer versions of the Firefox web browser, a new feature called electrolysis (shortened as e10s) is being introduced. This feature will separate out the main browser process from various web content processes. The benefits from this approach is the boost in the browser stability, performance and security. By default the multi-process Firefox uses one process for the browser and one for the web content. But you can easily make it use more than one process for the web content rendering. Here is how:
- Launch Firefox, type about:config in the address bar and press Enter.
- A warning will appear on the screen, you can proceed by clicking on the button I’ll be careful, I promise.
- Type ipc.process in the search box to narrow down the list of settings to the one we are looking for.
- Double-click on the setting named dom.ipc.processCount and change its value to the number of processes you want multi-process Firefox to use. By default the value is 1 and you can change it to any number larger than 1.
As of now the default value for the dom.ipc.processCount is only 1 for the understandable reason that Mozilla developers do not want too many Firefox web-content processes spawning up on your PC. So for now, they are keeping one process for the browser and one for the web-content. By changing the value as explained above, you will only increase the “possible” number of web-content processes. It depends on the Firefox browser on how and when it spawns the processes for rendering the web-content.