Chromium and Firefox have different architectural designs. Chromium follows a multi-process model with a browser kernel managing separate renderer and plugin processes, allowing crashes in one tab/plugin to be isolated. Firefox traditionally used a single process model but is working on a multi-process model. The multi-process approach enhances stability in Chromium but uses more resources, while Firefox uses fewer resources but vulnerabilities could previously affect the whole browser. Both browsers use extension and plugin systems but Chromium sandboxes plugins for added security.

1. Mozilla Firefox Architecture Vs. Chromium Architecture
Group I
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2. “ software application for retrieving,
presenting, and traversing
information resources on the World
Wide Web”
Wikipedia

3. • Bring information resources to the user for a given
URL.
• Handle Uniform Resource Identifier
• Direct prefixes that the browser cannot handle to
another application.
• Identify the web page content and display the
information
• Identify unsupported file types and direct user to
download them.

4. Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source
web browser developed and maintained
by Mozilla foundation. Firefox is the
second most widely used browser in the
world.
Chromium
chromium is the open source web browser
project from which Google Chrome draws
its source code..

5. supports tabbed browsing, which allows users to open several
pages in one window.
Integrated customizable download manager is also included

6. • Remember user history and Data
• Both Firefox and Chrome relies on the extension system.

7. It follows layered
architectural
Style. Each layer
below
provides
Services to upper
layer

9. PIPE AND FILTER

10. Master slave design
pattern is used. Where
Masters are located at
Network Service Package
and slaves are other
subsystems such as
protocol handler

11. Gecko is responsible for getting data from Necko subsystem and converting
them into a viewable form.
For that it gets services from other
components such as data
persistence , display backend ..
Etc.
In Rendering and browser engine
there are 6 components such as
document Parser, Content Model,
Frame Constructor, Image Library,
Style System and Platform
Specific Rendering and Widgets

12. Security of the Mozilla is implemented using the
component Personal Security manager

13. • Personal security manager gets services from
NSS and provides security services to the
client.
• NSS provides open source libraries to be
reused by the client applications and tools to
manage keys and security models.
• Crypto functions are set of public functions
that perform cryptographic operations

14. Views
Network
Data
Browser Kernel
JavaScript
Engine Rendering Extensions
Plugins
V8 engine
• Multiple instances of Rendering Engine will be used at the same time
• The browser kernel is responsible for managing multiple instances of
the rendering engine and for implementing the browser kernel API
• Rendering engine uses WebKit opens source layout engine for the
rendering process
• Chromium browser users a separate optimized JavaScript engine called
V8 instead of inbuilt JavaScript capabilities of WebKit to increase the
speed

15. Brings operating systems’ separate process architecture in to
the browser.
Use separate processes for browser tabs to protect the overall application
from bugs and glitches in the rendering engine (i.e. A malfunction in a single
tab does not affect the overall stability of the browser)
Main process that runs the
UI and manages tab and
plugin processes as the
"browser process".
Likewise, the tab-specific
processes are called
"render processes"

16. Chromium hope to reduce the severity of vulnerabilities by isolating a
browser’s complex components by adding layers of defense and reducing
their privileges.
Two major components
•Browser kernel (high privileged) – interacting with OS, data persistence, network
access. Subjected to OS level security barriers
•Rendering Engine (low privileged) - Chromium uses a modular architecture that places
the complex rendering engine in a low-privilege sandbox

17. Plugins are created by third party vendors. They cause many
security vulnerabilities and instabilities. Sandboxing can not be
used here because they are not designed to run in Chromium’s
sandboxed architecture.
To compromise security, stability and
usability solution is to run each plugin as
separate process. Rendering engine
instances will communicate with them
through IPCs
Advantages of running each plugin as a separate process
•Each plugin is run with users privileges. This improves usability (e.g. the
Flash Player plug-in can use the user's microphone and webcam)
•Crash of a plugin does not affect over all browser stability
Vendors could write future versions of plug-ins that operate within
Chromium's sandbox, to provide greater defense against plug-in
exploits.

18. • Chromium's separate process architecture and
it’s V8 JavaScript engine makes it fast
• Firefox maintains threads for each search
instance. So that chrome has become more
faster.

19. • Because of different rendering processes and
plugin processes in chrome error in a
rendering task or browser plugin does not
affect the stability of the overall browser
• Firefox has a disadvantage in this case
because if one plugin crashes it affects all
other pages. Electrolysis project is underway
to introduce process based browsing.

20. • Chromium's sandbox architecture protects
browser kernel and OS from malicious codes
• Firefox onion architecture for cryptographic
operations protects main crypto code in
Personal Security Manager.

21. • Separate process architecture in chromium
uses more memory and CPU.
• Firefox has its own advantage in this case.
Because it uses one single process and
memory consumption is very low comparing
to chrome.