Tag: mozilla
Firefox 3.6.4 Released: Flash No Longer Crashes Your Browser
by Ranju Chaudhary on Jun.23, 2010, under Latest Web Technologies, What's Happening?
After some delays, Mozilla has released Firefox 3.6.4, the newest version of the popular web browser. It comes with one big addition: protection against crashing due to third-party plugins, most notably Adobe Flash.
The updated browser, which you can download here, comes with dozens of bug fixes and stability upgrades. What the average user will care about most though is Firefox
crash protection, something that is a prominent feature of Google Chrome
.
Crash protection utilizes out-of-process plugins technology to run third-party plugins (specifically Flash, Quicktime, and Silverlight) in a separate process. In the past, a plugin crash would take down your entire Firefox browser. With crash protection however, “the browser will stay running while the portions of websites controlled by the plugin will be disabled.” It only takes a refresh to restart the plugin.
There is a catch, though: only Windows and Linux users have access to crash protection. According to Mozilla, making crash protection available to Mac OS X users would require major changes to Firefox’s infrastructure. However, the non-profit promises that it will become available for Mac users in Firefox 4, which should ship by the end of the year.
Mozilla issues new Firefox test release
by neetika on Mar.08, 2010, under Latest Web Technologies, Trends
For eager beavers who want a taste of Firefox to come, Mozilla issued a second preview release Wednesday of the browser.
The software is based on version 1.9.3 of the Gecko browser engine that underlies Firefox. The current Firefox 3.6, and an update called Lorentz, are based on 1.9.2.
The headline feature of the new preview release is the same for Lorentz, though: out-of-process plug-ins, which means that Adobe Systems Flash Player and the like run in a separate memory compartment to protect the browser overall when they crash. Mozilla hopes people will see how well it works on an OOPP testing page.
However, according to a mailing list posting by Benjamin Smedberg, who’s working on the OOPP feature, it only works on Linux and Windows systems at present. “MacOS presents some unique challenges: the traditional drawing and interaction model for plug-ins is very difficult to do across processes. We are working on Mac support for multi-process plug-ins, and hope to have a preview of this work available soon,” Smedberg said in an OOPP blog post.
The new alpha release also should cool off some hot spots that consume a lot of labor when laying out Web pages, Smedberg said, thereby improving performance.
