Velocity Mozilla is exploring ways of building a multi-threaded browser DOM, so that a single web page can be rendered using multiple processor cores.

"We think it's possible," Mozilla open source evangelist Chris Blizzard said on Thursday at the O'Reilly Velocity conference in Santa Clara, California. "This is an active area of research, and we invite anyone to join us."

Speaking with The Register, Blizzard said that the project is very much in the early stages, but it involves Rust, a new low-level programming language built at Mozilla. Mozilla man Graydon Hoare began Rust as a side project in 2006, but he's now working on it full-time, according to Blizzard. The language is built from the ground up for concurrency and safety. "It's a C++-like languages designed to let you build in parallelism and security," Blizzard said.

Today's browsers offer parallelism in other areas. Separate tabs can be run on multiple cores, though they do share some processes. Plug-ins are now run as separate processes. And things like http transactions and video and audio decoding are multi-threaded.

WebGL provides parallelism via GPU hardware acceleration. And with a browser-like mobile Firefox, Blizzard said, Mozilla uses separate processes for the browser chrome and the content.