Cliqz is now even faster and more stable

The newest version 1.10.0 of Cliqz for Desktop now supports the multi-process architecture Electrolysis (E10S) developed by Mozilla. The browser interface and web content (tabs) run in separate processes, resulting in greater overall performance and stability.

Especially users who work with many open tabs at the same time benefit from the advantages of the multi-process architecture:

• Responsiveness: By placing the web content into a separate process from the browser interface, Cliqz’s user interface continues to react quickly even when an opened page is doing heavy computation. The better responsiveness is noticeable, for example, by the fact that even under heavy workload mouse clicks are recognized without delay and the corresponding commands are executed immediately.
• Stability: Tabs shouldn’t crash, but when they do, isolating web content in separate processes means they can crash without taking down the rest of the browser.
• Performance: Modern computers often have four or more CPU cores. In a multi-process architecture work can be spread across the many CPU cores allowing for more efficient utilization of the underlying hardware.

Of course, several parallel running processes have a greater memory footprint than a single process. However, the impact of Electrolysis on the memory usage of the Cliqz browser, which is based on Mozilla Firefox, is limited. As with Firefox, which supports the multi-process architecture since version 48 beta, the memory usage should increase by 10 to 20 percent. That is still half the memory of Google Chrome with the same sites loaded.

This applies to the first version of Electrolysis, where all browser tabs are still running in the same process and separated from the one in which the user interface is running. In the long term, each tab should have its own process. First, there will be child processes for web content, media playback and so-called NPAPI plug-ins.

Electrolysis is activated by default in the most recent desktop versions of Cliqz browser. All browser components, including Quick Search, Cliqz Tab, and Forget Window, have been adjusted to the multi-process architecture, as well as the supported extensions HTTPS Everywhere and LastPass.

Besides better stability and performance due to Electrolysis, Cliqz 1.10.0 for Windows, macOS and Linux also provides improvements to the user interface and various fixes. For details, please refer to the Release Notes.