Bugzilla

There is work in progress towards the "Fork Server" method discussed in bug 1480452 comment 8; the setting `dom.ipc.forkserver.enable` pref to 1 will enable this if Firefox is built with it, which is the [default](https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/468a65168dd0bc3c7d602211a566c16e66416cce/toolkit/moz.configure#2405-2407) on Linux, FreeBSD and OpenBSD. I don't know how stable this is, since it's never been enabled by default (except on KaiOS, but there it's for saving RAM), and I don't know how well it deals with other files (e.g. omni.ja) changing.

I did a quick test with a Nightly on Debian; I was able to untar a new version directly over an old one and still open tabs with new domains. There's probably a good reason why it isn't yet enabled in general on Linux, desirable as it would be in the face of package managers, so I'd be careful before enabling this pref on a system you can't afford to break. But it may not be impossibly far off.

There might be work towards the "Fork Server" method discussed in bug 1480452 comment 8; the setting `dom.ipc.forkserver.enable` pref true will enable this if Firefox is built with it, which is the [default](https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/468a65168dd0bc3c7d602211a566c16e66416cce/toolkit/moz.configure#2405-2407) on Linux, FreeBSD and OpenBSD. I don't know how stable this is, since it's never been enabled by default (except on KaiOS, but there it's for saving RAM), and I don't know how well it deals with other files (e.g. omni.ja) changing.

I did a quick test with a Nightly on Debian; I was able to untar a new version directly over an old one and still open tabs with new domains. There's probably a good reason why it isn't yet enabled in general on Linux, desirable as it would be in the face of package managers, so I'd be careful before enabling this pref on a system you can't afford to break. But it may not be impossibly far off.