Mozilla has been researching ways to make Firefox even faster and more stable. Today the company says it will increase the speed and stability of the browser by using multiple processes to display web pages.

This is of course no different than what Microsoft and Google have done with their browsers. Internet Explorer and Google Chrome both leverage a multi-process display system. This means that each page runs in a separate process which leads to added security and stability, because if one page goes bad, it doesn’t affect the others.

This new feature will be coming to Firefox in the future, through a project Mozilla is calling “Electrolysis”. A prototype has already been assembled featuring the “Electrolysis” project, Mozilla has outlined the benefits of the multi-process feature in a blog post:

• Increased stability: if a plugin or webpage tries to use all the processor, memory, or even crashes, a process can isolate that bad behavior from the rest of the browser.
• Performance: By splitting work up among multiple processes, the browser can make use of multiple processor cores available on modern desktop computers and the next generation of mobile processors. The user interface can also be more responsive because it doesn’t need to block on long-running web page activities.
• Security: If the operating system can run a process with lower privileges, the browser can isolate web pages from the rest of the computer, making it harder for attackers to infect a computer.

However, getting this new functionality to Firefox won’t be an easy to accomplish, thus, the company will focus on Windows and Linux because the team is most familiar and comfortable in those environments. A Mac compatible version will come later down the road.

The details of plan have been outlined in the aforementioned blog post, but a more detailed version of the plans can be found the Mozilla wiki.