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."

Comments

This is all fine and dandy,

[gzipped_tar]

but can it be extended so that plugins are not only run in their separate processes, but separate SELinux sandboxes as well?

Re:This is all fine and dandy,

[the_womble]

[quote]Even though X haters have been screaming for years that network transparency needs to go.[/quote]

Largely because they do not realise how useful it can be...

Re:This is all fine and dandy,

[gzipped_tar]

Well, why not just create two user accounts for your girlfriend and yourself respectively? That makes almost everything easier. Heck, you can even run them concurrently.

Using it now

[flyingfsck]

Let's see how it goes. The auto-restart of plugins should be good, but could also cause a plugin DOS.

Re:About time

[ushering05401]

We've known about plugin crashiness for a long time. We're just now going multi-process for this?

Translating that to FOSS speak: We've known about plugin crashiness for a long time. This problem would never be fixed if it was up to me to fix it.

Re:Ugh, another Chrome story

[Lord Byron II]

Point taken. They have sailed past 1.0 and, as far as I know, are up to v5.0. But look at:

http://www.google.com/chrome and you'll see in capital letters (upper-right) that its definitely still in beta.

My point is, until Google itself thinks Chrome is ready-to-go, why should I?

Re:How is this new?

[TheRaven64]

Same here. It's been happening since last night - around 14 hours ago, and it's quite irritating because it means that I can't see any of the replies to my posts. Without the ability to see - and reply to - replies, Slashdot becomes a one-shot discussion forum like OSNews or Digg. Please fix this soon!

Re:Ugh, another Chrome story

[Omestes]

The "beta" label has pretty much died. In Google-ese "beta" means a normal release, and when they hit the "1.0" and finally take of the beta tag, it pretty much means nothing.

Have you been able to tell the difference between the beta of Gmail, and the full on release? I haven't.

Now if you said this about the "dev channel", or Chromium daily, you would have a point. Though even being at "full-on release" status doesn't mean much, how often does Firefox update, and push bug patches, even at release status? The Mozilla team are tinkering with release versions about as much as Google is tinkering with their betas.

If we're talking about stability, this isn't really an argument either. Chrome is about as stable as Firefox is currently. Both have nagging issues that don't seem to ever be fixed, though I haven't had Chrome or Chromium full-on crash yet, and I pretty much ditched Firefox's last full release because it didn't play well on either Win7 or Karmic (a crash a day is unacceptable).

Also, you're talking about personal computing right, as opposed to business? And you're also talking about something as banal and inconsequential as a web browser, right? What's the worst that can happen (on a well protected OS), you loose your cookies or saved form data? We're not talking about running a server, or business app here, where you can loose data that actually matters, or worse, money.