Compartmental memory management in a modern web browser

Abstract

Since their inception, the usage pattern of web browsers has changed substantially. Rather than sequentially navigating static web sites, modern web browsers often manage a large number of simultaneous tabs displaying dynamic web content, each of which might be running a substantial amount of client-side JavaScript code. This environment introduced a new degree of parallelism that was not fully embraced by the underlying JavaScript virtual machine architecture. We propose a novel abstraction for multiple disjoint JavaScript heaps, which we call compartments. We use the notion of document origin to cluster objects into separate compartments. Objects within a compartment can reference each other directly. Objects across compartments can only reference each other through wrappers. Our approach reduces garbage collection pause times by permitting collection of sub-heaps (compartments), and we can use cross-compartment wrappers to enforce cross origin object access policy.Our research proposes a new layer of abstraction for the JavaScript heap. We split the JavaScript heap into sub-heaps, which

Dynamic space limits for Haskell

“…Resource containers have also shown up in the architecture of Mozilla Firefox [25], under the name of compartments. While they do not address the issue of resource limits directly, their architecture closely mirrors ours: compartments are composed of arenas (blocks which only hold a single type of object).…”

“…Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. per tab, while Mozilla Firefox, which runs in a single process, only requires 2 MB per tab [25].…”

Security and Authentication of Web Browsers using FCM

“…Wagner et.al. [9] gave the idea that modern web browsers do not sequentially navigate static web sites they manage multiple simultaneous tabs that display dynamic web content which may be running client-side JavaScript code. This parallelism was not fully taken by JavaScript virtual machine architecture.…”

JaTE

“…Every object is associated with a principal, and this principal has direct access to the object, while the access of other principals is mediated using a wrapper object that can enforce a policy. The set of all objects belonging to a principal is held within the principal's compartment [41]. Many of the key challenges in JaTE, including complete mediation and the realization of a secure multi-principal compartment model, arise from the complexity and highly dynamic nature of JavaScript.…”