14 DAY TRIAL // The long-awaited Firefox 3.6.4 has finally landed. Normally, there’s not much to get exited about this type of minor releases, they focus on fixing stability and security fixes. This time around, Mozilla broke from tradition and added a new feature in a ‘point’ release and it’s quite a big one as well. Firefox 3.6.4 brings support for “crash protection” or Out-of-Process plugins (OOPP) as the technology has been known so far internally.
Simply put, Firefox will now relegate some third-party web browser plugins to a separate process, isolated to a degree from the main browser process. This means that in the, unfortunately, likely event that a plugin like the notorious Adobe Flash crashes, it won't take down the entire browser and you can continue working uninterruptedly.
“Mozilla recognizes that third-party plugins provide important functionality in many of today’s websites. At the same time, plugins can lead to problems for users as they browse. With the ability to automatically alert users when they have out of date plugins, and now crash protection, Firefox 3.6.4 allows users to experience all the content they love without any of the hassles,” Mike Beltzner, Mozilla’s director or Firefox, wrote.
For now, Firefox comes with “crash protection” only on Windows and Linux, as Mac users have been left out. Mozilla claims that building OOPP in the Mac version would have required massive changes to the code base, so the feature has been deferred to Firefox 4. It also only covers the Adobe Flash, Apple QuickTime and Microsoft Silverlight plugins. However, Mozilla has said that it plans to include support for other plugins in the future.
Apparently, the feature, which has been through an extensive beta-testing program, has brought down the number of crashes significantly, though Mozilla isn’t providing any numbers. It’s definitely a great step forward and should make the lives of Firefox users easier, but Mozilla is late in this game and most other browsers out there have a similar or better feature. Google Chrome, for example, uses a separate process for each tab, plugin and extension.