You may have heard recent news of the changes happening at Mozilla where I work. As part of those changes we’ve also re-organised (reorg’d) many teams and individuals.

My team assignment has changed and I no-longer work on SpiderMonkey’s garbage collector. This is a bit of a bummer because I was hoping to make memory management and garbage collection my career focus and become an expert, like I had already done with automatic parallelism.

My new team is the Fission team, a new team to work in stronger process isolation for Firefox. So far I’ve been working on DocumentChannel with several other engineers. DocumentChannel is a feature/project for launching new page/iframe loads from the parent process so that redirects to not spawn two many short-lived processes. This feature has landed in Firefox Nightly but there’s still refinements to make. So far I’m enjoying working with another team and getting to know more people within the organisation.

When we roll-out Fission it’s going to add new challenges for Firefox’s memory usage. I’ll be putting myself forward at that time to work on reducing memory usage (or making smarter choices with memory), with any luck that will mean working on memory allocators or the GC again.