943420 - Keep certain about pages in-process

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox for Metro Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Jim Mathies [:jimm]]

about:start is a good candidate (which should fix bug 943379), about:support, about:blank, about:plugins, about:addons, among others.

Comment 1

[Tim Abraldes [:TimAbraldes] [:tabraldes]]

Matt, I'm curious about the rationale for making pages in-process. Jim mentioned that you would have insight into that.

If we do go ahead and make our "about:" pages load in-process, then we can resolve bug 943379 (and whatever similar bugs would exist for the other "about:" pages) as duplicates of this bug.

Comment 2

[Matt Brubeck (:mbrubeck)]

(In reply to Tim Abraldes [:TimAbraldes] [:tabraldes] from comment #1)
> Matt, I'm curious about the rationale for making pages in-process. Jim
> mentioned that you would have insight into that.

I believe the main reason in Fennec was that our out-of-process graphics and scrolling code at the time was not able to scroll XUL documents.  If that limitation is (or can be) fixed then I think we can WONTFIX this bug.

The Fennec approach did have the added benefit of making complex chrome pages a bit easier to implement, since they could communicate with the browser chrome directly, but this is not really a good enough reason to keep the special exception.  It also had a downside that it wasn't possible to navigate from an about: page to a remote page (or vice versa) in the same tab.

Comment 3

[Matt Brubeck (:mbrubeck)]

Bug 552832 is where this was originally implemented.  According to comments there, the main reason was actually that the about: protocol handler did not work in the child process.  That may have been fixed in more recent work -- it looks like desktop Firefox is able to load about: pages in the child process, for example.

Comment 4

[Tim Abraldes [:TimAbraldes] [:tabraldes]]

From comment 3 and bug 943379 comment 2 it sounds like we don't want to keep our about pages in-process. Re-open if that's inaccurate.