We may all have a disdain for Chrome – OSNews users probably use Chrome a lot less than the average public – but that doesn’t mean the browser doesn’t sometimes do interesting things other browsers should copy. Chrome is in the the process of increasing its release cadence, but getting users to restart their browser more often than they already do to apply these higher number of updates is going to be a problem. As such, Google is working on something that seems quite obvious now that they’ve talking about it:
Investing in “dynamic patching” that will eliminate the need for a full browser restart in most cases. By leveraging Chrome’s multi-process architecture, dynamic patching sequentially replaces background child processes (like the Renderer and GPU) with updated binaries on the fly. Stay tuned to learn more as we research and develop this feature.
↫ Chrome Security Team
Chrome was the first browser to use multiple processes, isolating tabs from one another so that if one website or tab went haywire, your other tabs would be unaffected. It makes perfect sense to have the browser use new, updated binaries for new tabs you open as soon as they become available, in a sort of ship-of-Theseus kind of approach to updating. Of course, you can’t postpone the inevitable forever, but this should provide real-world benefits to users. Neat.
The linked blog post goes into much more detail about other things too, like various low-level mitigations to prevent bugs and security issues from causing too much harm.
This definitely falls under the “I don’t like this program or the company behind it but I really like their ideas sometimes” umbrella.
A long time ago Google was an innovative company, it’s nice to see them actually innovating again. Too bad it’s for a browser that isn’t privacy-safe, but maybe this can trickle down to the better Chromium forks out there.