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Firefox Lorentz Keeps Plugin Crashes Under Control
pastababa writes "A beta of the Firefox Lorentz project is now available for download and public testing. Eming reports Firefox 'Lorentz' provides uninterrupted browsing for Windows and Linux users when there is a crash in plugins. Plugins run in a separate process from the browser. If a plugin crashes it will not crash the browser, and unresponsive plugins are automatically restarted. The process-isolation feature has been in Google's Chrome from the beginning. Chrome sandboxes individual tabs, and the crash of one tab does not affect the running of the rest of Chrome browser. Firefox currently isolates only Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime, and Microsoft Silverlight, but will eventually isolate all plugins running on a page. Mozilla encourages users to test Firefox 'Lorentz' on their favorite websites. Users who install Firefox 'Lorentz' will eventually be automatically updated to a future version of Firefox 3.6 in which this feature is included."
Hmm, Google Chrome already handles plugins this way, but one flash-heavy site I know delivers a lot of streaming video and absolutely will crash either Firefox or Chrome in linux (I use Mint, mainly) without fail, if given enough time, Gnome or KDE. Crash as in the entire browser becomes unresponsive and must force-close. After it did this to Firefox a few times I tried Chrome, with the same result. Everything will be fine for a few minutes, sometimes up to an hour or so, then the whole browser will die. Haven't tried IE, tried Firefox with Windows 7 and had the same thing happen. I will certainly look into anything that prevents crashes for Firefox, since I strongly prefer it to every other browser I've tried, since most of the time it works perfectly.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
I didn't think it autorestarted plugins. They even provided a reason (probably the same reason Google did it)... current webpages will not expect plugins to restart. And because it's possible for Flash to make JS calls etc this could lead to side effects and page breaking, I think they thought it was just best to reload the page so JS restarts too. Of course I read this on a blog a few weeks back, they could have changed their minds?
Konqueror has run flash (and more generally nsplugins) in a separate process since before Chrome was even a rumour. I used to run Konqueror as my primary browser and when I stopped using it I was surprised to discover that other browsers didn't run flash as a separate process.
Firefox currently isolate [sic] only Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime and Microsoft Silverlight, but will eventually isolate all plugins running on a page.
The quote emphasizes that Lorentz affects only plugins, not extensions, a distinction that seems to be escaping many posters.
I've had flash behave pretty screwily short of crashing, so this might be nicer if it included a mechanism to manually stop & restart plugins. Perhaps it will expose API allowing other add-ons to do so.
The plugin that gives me by far the most trouble (on Windows) is Adobe Acrobat Reader. I can already restart that (by killing the process) without crashing firefox.
Separate address spaces. When a thread crashes, the whole process goes down. If separate process dies, the browser should still be intact.
yeah that's also why chrome uses so much memory, and also, processes are be nature slightly slower to communicate since you can't just lock and access the memory. In practice however its peanuts, and on Linux its pretty much just as good.
anyways, using subprocesses for plugins makes complete sense. using them for tabs etc are just a way to work around the browser's instability. Rather have quick threads and non buggy code, than people just thinking a plugin went wrong while really, the browser is at fault. (Sure, you only lose the tab in that case, but still).
Plugins are not extensions.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...