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

How is this new?

[CRCulver]

Versions of Gnash have frequently segfaulted on my Linux box (the segfault is reported by dmesg), yet I've never had a browser crash because of it. I had thought that plugins were already isolated enough from the application as a whole.

Only as a side effect of being 32-bit

[pavon]

No, this has not been the normal plugin architecture. When Linux moved to 64-bit, firefox was ported to 64-bit but all of the proprietary plugins were still 32-bit. The solution to this problem was to create nspluginwrapper which would run the apps in a separate process. It had some bugs of it's own, wasn't always reliable about letting you restart crashed plugins, and has itself crashed the browser on me, but it largely prevented plugins from crashing the browser as a side effect.

Older 32-bit versions of firefox on linux, and all versions on windows did not have this capability.

No restart on plugin installtion/update?

[deek]

Does this mean that, when "Lorentz" covers all plugins, we can install and update plugins without having to restart Firefox?

That would be a worthwhile feature. It's annoying having to restart the browser for any plugin changes.

Re:No restart on plugin installtion/update?

[xtracto]

Ah yeah, that is one of the most irritating things I hate on firefox. Why would I have to restart the web browser after installing an extension like scrapbook? this is from the people who whined that you have to restart Windows for any reason...

What I would really like is an "extension profiler", that is, a program that let you check exact statistics of resources used by the different Firefox extensions. This way you could see which is the extension that is taking more memory or time and it may be a good tool to debug extensions when developing them.