When Google decided to create a new browser, it knew it had an opportunity to avoid many of the problems facing existing browsers by coming up with new ways to do things and building a solid basis from the start. One of the smartest decisions was to give each individual tab its own process thread, which would solve a lot of security and stability issues.
It was a more complex technical approach, but it paid off in the end. However, it’s not possible to give each tab its own process every time, as there may be shared resources between them, so Chrome had to make a compromise between security and compatibility. Now, though, Google is giving developers the possibility to force links to be opened in new processes thanks to a little HTML 5 trickery.
“Google Chrome already uses separate OS processes to isolate independent tabs from each other in the browser, so that crashes or slowdowns in one tab won’t affect the others,” Charlie Reis, software engineer, writes on the Chromium blog.
“In many cases, though, Google Chrome needs to keep pages from related tabs in the same process, since they may access each other’s contents using JavaScript code… In practice, web developers may find situations where they would like links to other pages to open in a separate process. As on… (read more)