Re: Ahoy Pie R8s! New Win11

On Mon, 8/17/2026 1:49 PM, rbowman wrote:
> On Mon, 17 Aug 2026 09:48:57 -0700, John Ames wrote:
> 
>> but on top of that you're perpetually stuck with a dozen Edge processes
>> running in the background to serve up the New New Flavor of GUI,
> 
> I think that's a chromium 'feature'.  I use Brave, which is also chromium 
> based, and it launches a lot of processes. 'killall' comes in handy if you 
> want to shut it down without closing all the tabs.
> 

Firefox, Thunderbird, Chromium use isolated processes for
attack surfaces. They are multi-process softwares. Firefox
for example, the more tabs you open, eventually more handlers
are opened for sets of tabs.

An example of an attack surface, is a "malformed video" your application
is attempting to play. The movie player is one of those child processes
which does nothing but handle movie rectangles. The movie player would be
unelevated, tipping it over and crashing it, does nothing to the parent
and the parent forks another one. In the old days, the parent played
the movie, and if the movie was malformed, the whole browser would crash.

For Windows, you have to kill the parent task, to kill the parent
and all children. Just identifying the PID of the movie player
and giving the movie player a smack, just causes another movie
player to be forked.

And as cross-platform softwares, these behaviors for the named programs
above, should exist on all platforms.

On Windows, you can use Sysinternals Process Explorer, to identify
which process is the parent. Task Manager does not seem to have a
column for PPID (Parent Process ID). Sysinternals has the parent
and children with indented display, which shows the child-relationship
as expected.

I expect Chrome can be credited with this arch change, Firefox
merely copied it, Thunderbird switched this off, until more recently
where the additional staff embraced the approach. Thunderbird still
restricts the kind of media it will handle, so the attack surface
isn't quite the same as with Firefox.

    Paul