Isolating Web Programs in Modern Browser Architectures
Venue
Eurosys, Nuremburg (2009)
Publication Year
2009
Authors
Charles Reis, Steven D. Gribble
BibTeX
Abstract
We provide three contributions in this paper. First, we present abstractions of web programs and program instances, and we show that these abstractions clarify how browser components interact and how appropriate program boundaries can be identified. Second, we identify backwards compatibility tradeoffs that constrain how web content can be divided into programs without disrupting existing web sites. Third, we present a multi-process browser architecture that isolates these web program instances from each other, improving fault tolerance, resource management, and performance. We discuss how this architecture is implemented in Google Chrome, and we provide a quantitative performance evaluation examining its benefits and costs.
