Multiple cores make this task switching that much easier for the OS to accomplish, but if there’s only one process for a browser, a long operation just stops the whole browser until it is done.
Normally, a multitasking OS can switch from one thread or process to the next at will (and it does so all the time), but a long operation hangs it up until it’s done, and it can’t switch around to make things more responsive. When the content rendering is happening in the same process as handling the drawing of the UI and responding to user input, sometimes there is a long blocking operation in a content rendering thread, meaning that once the CPU begins to execute that bit of code, it can’t do anything else until it’s finished. The older single-process Firefox would often stutter and judder and suffer from all kinds of jank, which was particularly noticeable while scrolling. That was a big part of it, but e10s, or multiprocess Firefox, also allows it to be much more responsive and smooth in use, especially on multicore CPUs that have been the norm for a long time now. The e10s project in Firefox (short for “electrolysis”), which broke up the browser into multiple processes instead of just one (as browsers used to be back in the single core CPU days) was about more than security. This reply was modified 1 year, 6 months ago by bratkinson. Which process is doing what is open to conjecture. In addition, it’s reading files in my Norton 360 folder due to the Norton Safe Browsing add in to Firefox. It’s also reading some Microsoft files in \Apdata\Roaming\Microsoft as well.
What are the other processes doing? The downloaded file activity checker I use reveals Firefox is occasionally reading files buried deep in the users\\Appdata\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles folder. I think viruses started with that ‘trick’ to make removing them quite difficult. In fact, most products, including Windows and A/V software have that kind of code in every module, that checks all the others to ensure they’re still running, and restarts them if they’re not. There may even be a process to ensure that the others haven’t been ‘killed’ (terminated) and will automatically restart any that were. It’s also likely there’s a process to ensure that it hasn’t been tampered with or pirated, also like Adobe, Microsoft, and A/V products. I’m guessing that Firefox has one of the active processes doing an occasional check for updates, the same as Adobe, Microsoft, and others do with their products. As I almost always use Firefox with one tab open, I’ve noticed I always have 5 processes running and more if I have additional tab open.
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