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...

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.