Mozilla a few months ago presented an architecture security to isolate websites. Essentially, this new architecture separates processes into different sites and gives security metrics.
Mozilla has been working on this project for several years but was eventually overtaken by Google. Site Isolation has been a feature of Chrome since 2018.
How does Web Isolation Architecture work?
Firefox Site Isolation works by separating sites at the process level. Restricts a site from accessing the site μνήμηon the other hand, something that was not possible in the previous architecture. This means that when you activate a new website, your system will create a new process to load it.
Each of these processes is independent and does not share memory. This prevents malicious sites from accessing information on other pages.
The new feature provides security against the following threats:
- Violation of cookies between sites
- Eavesdropping data HTML, XML and JSON
- Theft of passwords stored in the browser
- Utilization of licenses granted on another site
- Exploit DOM data from another site
How Firefox Site Isolation differs from the existing security model
In the previous model, Firefox created a fixed number of processes. It used to invoke eight processes for web content, two for semi-privileged content and four for graphics, multimedia and networking. But this allowed two or more different sites to run under the same process. So there was a possibility that malicious sites could exploit the data of other pages.
However, the web isolation model fixes this problem by separating processes at runtime. This means that even if you load a malicious website, it will no longer be able to bypass its own process to access other page data.
Enable Firefox Site Isolation
You can enable the new feature at version Firefox Nightly from the internal address
about: preferences # experimental
Check the Fission (Site Isolation) checkbox. If you are using a beta or the latest version of Firefox open the internal address about: config search for fission.autostart and set its value to true. You will need to restart Firefox for the changes to take effect.
Page isolation is still in its infancy, and Firefox may require additional CPU resources or become a bit slow.
Personally I have not had any problems with 50+ tabs open.
