How to enable a separate process per tab in Firefox

I always keep a watch on Firefox's latest nightly builds as all the cool new features land there first. Here is an amazing news I read about Firefox. The current nightly version of Firefox comes with a secret hidden feature which allows you to enable a separate process for each tab in Firefox! What does this mean for us average users? Well, the process-per-tab model is a very clever architectural solution to prevent crashes. It allows preventing the entire browser from crashing if something goes wrong. With multi-process tabs, only the problematic tab will crash, and try to recover, while the rest of the tabs continue to work properly. If you are familiar with Google Chrome or Internet Explorer, you might be knowing that both use a similar process-per-tab architecture. Let's look now at how to enable this separate process per tab functionality in Firefox.

At this moment, I use the following version of Firefox Nightly:
About Nightly
To enable separate processes per tab, you have to perform the following steps:

1. In the address bar of Firefox Nightly, type the following:

about:config

Click the "I will be careful, I promise!" button.
2. The list of all configurable settings in Firefox will appear in the current tab. At the top of the list, you will see the "Search" textbox. Type there "browser.tabs.remote" without quotes.
3. Locate the "browser.tabs.remote" option and set it to:
true - to enable the separate process per tab feature in Firefox Nightly.
false - to disable the separate process per tab feature in Firefox Nightly.


4. Restart the browser.

After restarting Firefox, you will notice that tabs titles are underlined. This means that the tab is running in its own process.

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Author: Sergey Tkachenko

Sergey Tkachenko is a software developer who started Winaero back in 2011. On this blog, Sergey is writing about everything connected to Microsoft, Windows and popular software. Follow him on Telegram, Twitter, and YouTube.

One thought on “How to enable a separate process per tab in Firefox”

  1. I’m not sure how it happens on Windows, but as of today, e10s (Electrolysis) doesn’t actually separate tabs to processes.
    From https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis: “Process-per-tab, like Google Chrome, is on our roadmap.”

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