14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla isn’t known for its development speed. Even though Firefox is a solid product, the development team has problems keeping up with deadlines, which are themselves pretty relaxed. It took them almost three months to complete Firefox 3.6.4, a minor update by Mozilla’s development cycle. The reason for the delay was the introduction of the Out-of-Process Plugins technology which Mozilla now calls “crash protection.”
However, now, just a few days after 3.6.4, Mozilla is releasing the next update and it’s even skipping a version number to do it. That would make Firefox 3.6.6 quite a special update and indeed it is, in a way; all it brings is an increased timeout for unresponsive plugins.
“Today, we launched an update to our crash protection feature to extend the amount of time Firefox will wait before terminating unresponsive plugins... When a plugin freezes, making the whole browser unresponsive, Firefox 3.6.4 terminates the unresponsive plugin after waiting 10 seconds,” Mozilla’s Director of Firefox, Mike Beltzner explained.
“Following the release of Firefox 3.6.4 we heard from some users, mainly those using older computers, that they sometimes expect longer periods of non-responsiveness from plugins, especially with games... To address this, we increased the amount of time Firefox waits for a plugin to respond before terminating it from 10 to 45 seconds,” he added.
As Mozilla explains, the default timeout for an unresponsive plugin was 10 seconds. Having beta tested Firefox 3.6.4 with almost one million people, Mozilla was fairly confident that they had the right figure. As it turns out, people who test pre-release software versions tend to be more tech-savvy and have relatively modern computers.
But, once Firefox 3.6.4 was pushed through the automatic update process to the millions of people using the web browser, those using slower machines complained that Firefox shut down web apps built on Adobe Flash too fast. That's because those using older hardware are the same ones playing FarmVille on Facebook. So Mozilla issued Firefox 3.6.6 which increases the default time the browser waits before terminating a plugin which deems it unresponsive to 45 seconds, up from 10. Other than that, there are absolutely no changes, fixes or updates in this new release.
Firefox 3.6.6 for Windows is available for download here. Firefox 3.6.6 for Linux is available for download here. Firefox 3.6.6 for Mac is available for download here.