> And even keeping each document in its own (OS) thread ain't really that unprecedented; browsers already do this, last I checked (each open tab being a "document" in this context) - in some cases (like Chrome) even doing one "document" per process.
That is not correct. (Source: I am a former Mozilla Distinguished Engineer.)
Chrome (and Firefox, with Fission enabled) do one process "per site", e.g. one process for all documents at google.com. (In some cases they may use finer granularity for various reasons, but that's the default.) In each process, there is one "main thread" that all documents share.
> Would that not also be the case if all those documents used a single shared block of memory?
No. Memory freed when you delete content from one document would be reused when you add content to another document.
That is not correct. (Source: I am a former Mozilla Distinguished Engineer.)
Chrome (and Firefox, with Fission enabled) do one process "per site", e.g. one process for all documents at google.com. (In some cases they may use finer granularity for various reasons, but that's the default.) In each process, there is one "main thread" that all documents share.
> Would that not also be the case if all those documents used a single shared block of memory?
No. Memory freed when you delete content from one document would be reused when you add content to another document.