This strategy exacts a fixed per-process cost up front but results in less memory bloat overall as fragmentation is confined to each process and no longer results in further memory allocations. This prevents tasks from interfering with each other which is good for both security and stability an attacker successfully gaining access to one application does not give them access to all and failure in one application results in a “Sad Tab” screen of death. A separate process is allocated to each task (eg tabs, plugins), as is the case with modern operating systems.

The Gears team were considering a multithreaded browser (noting that a problem with existing web browser implementations was that they are inherently single-threaded) and Chrome implemented this concept with a multiprocessing architecture.

Speed improvements are a primary design goal.

No features of this, and no implications of the default mode with respect to Google’s database are given. Google announces a so-called incognito mode claiming that it “lets you browse the web in complete privacy because it doesn’t record any of your activity”. Google has also developed a new phishing blacklist, which will be built into Chrome, as well as made available via a separate public API. There is an exception to this rule browser plugins such as Adobe Flash Player do not run within the boundaries of the tab jail, and so users will still be vulnerable to cross-browser exploits based on plugins, until plugins have been updated to work with the new Chrome security. Google say they have “taken the existing process boundary and made it into a jail”.

Every tab in Google Chrome is sandboxed, so that a tab can display contents of a web page and accept user input, but it will not be able to read the user’s desktop or personal files.

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