Speed, Responsiveness and Stability to get a boost in the next Firefox for Mobile, Fennec 2.0

Firefox developers are planning to bring some very productive changes in the next version of their mobile browser, Fennec 2.0. This upcoming browser will support Hardware accelerated rendering and out of process web content. Mark Finkle wrote in a post about the inclusion of Project Layers and Project Electrolysis which will enable these two powerful features in the next Firefox for Mobile.

Firefox for Mobile, codenamed Fennec, is a Firefox web browser for ARM devices. As of now Fennec officialy supports only Nokia N900 running Maemo 5. Their decision to stick to only smartphones enables as well as challenges them to make the best use of the technology in the devices and provide a great User Experience.

Out of Process WebContent

These two projects will be making an appearance in Fennec for the first time. We have already seen the magic of Project Electrolysis in the form of out of process plugins in Firefox 3.6.6. But this was just a taste of its power. Electrolysis aims to use separate processes for the browser UI, web content and plugins. And this is what developers are planning to include in Fennec 2.0. Since, its not all about plugins anymore, instead of oopp they are named out-of-process/OOP Tabs.

As far as implementation goes, work is going on to complete the Phase II of Fennec OOP-Tabs.

Electrolysis is not all about using a separate process for everything to prevent crashing or freezes; they have a big impact on the speed, stability and security of the browser.

• Since, the webpages will be isolated(running in different processes) and if an Operating system runs them at lower privileges, it will be difficult for an attacker to compromise the system.
• Since we are talking about multiple processes, we can divide the work among separate processes and make use of the multiple processor cores available to speed up the task.
• Using separate processes, a crashed or high CPU consuming web page or plugin can be very easily isolated and terminated without affecting the browser.

This has been well explained by Benjamin Smedberg.

We can hope for multiprocess webcontent to be included in the first alpha, arriving soon.

Hardware Rendering

Another important feature will be the integration of Project Layers which will enable hardware rendering on mobiles and removal of the custom build canvas-tile-cache rendering solution. As stated by Mark.

Layers supports a “retained mode” rendering system, which means the application can drop the canvas-tile-cache system and use traditional XUL <browser> elements for the browsing surface.

From the Fennec 2.0 planning document, there are plans to provide better integration for Android mobile devices too. We have already seen a pre-alpha release of Fennec for Android, so its fair to say that by the time 2.0 releases, Fennec will be supporting various mobiles running Android.

There are going to be various UI changes in Fennec 2.0 but no doubt the major attaraction will be the added support for Android and inclusion of the two projects to improve the performance, stability and speed of this Firefox Mobile browser.