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This provides more technical details: <https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/05/introducing-firefox-new-si...>, which should be more interesting to HN than a marketing announcement.
In particular, it seems that "site" isn't precisely defined. It seems to be based on domains, but backed by a human-curated list of "sites": <https://github.com/publicsuffix/list>.
So it's different than Chrome's "every webpage gets a separate process".
Site Isolation launched in Chrome in 2018, but the work started in earnest in 2012 -- see the below check-in. The idea in Chrome dated to before the Chrome 1.0 launch; it was the subject of Charlie Reis's PhD dissertation and he interned on Chrome pre-public launch.
https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/c6f2e67ab40...
Site isolation proved to be the biggest refactor in Chrome's history, and was one of the motivating reasons for the webkit/blink fork. Making site isolation work touched a huge host of features, since handling iframes out of process has a way of making simple things incredibly complicated.
The example I always gave was: imagine how the "find text in page" browser feature would be implemented. With the entire document in-process, it was a simple for loop. With the document and its subframes sharded across multiple processes, it is now a distributed search problem that requires handling of out-of-order results and stitching them into a traversal order. What's more, to achieve Chrome's security goals, you want to avoid introducing functionality that would allow the [presumed-compromised] process of the outer document to query the contents of the inner document via the find in page feature. So you can't simply do this as a peer-to-peer query between the renderer processes; it needs to be coordinated by the main browser process.
Congrats to the Firefox team on this milestone.