Mozilla separates Firefox’s plug-ins as different processes

March 5, 2010 7:29 am by Jal

In Dec 09, Mozilla talked about the ‘out of process plugins’ (OOP) architecture that could render plugins in Firefox as seperate processes making it easy to identify a malperforming plugin and end it using the task manager. Turns out, Mozilla is all set to release the Mozilla Developer Preview 3.7 alpha 2 (codenamed Lorentz), feature packed with OOP.

Yes, it is an alpha preview version which means it’s basically for testing purposes. However, I assume this feature will definitely be incorporated in Firefox 4 which is anticipated to be a grand superset of what Firefox is today.

The following screenshot, courtesy Mozilla Links, shows each plugin running as different processes by the name ‘mozilla-runtime.exe’.

OOP process manager

Mozilla’s Benjamin Smedberg says,

When a plugin crashes, the Mozilla crash reporter kicks in and submits the crash report to Mozilla. Then we replace the plugin display with the crashed-plugin UI. When you reload the page, we restart the plugin process.

This is what the crashed-plugin UI mentioned by Benjamin looks like:

OOP crashed plugin

Neat! Isn’t it? Now before giving out the download link I’d like to mention it again that this is an Alpha version of the software which might contain bugs. So use at your own risk.

Download Mozilla Developer Preview 3.7 alpha 2 / ~ 8 MB

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Trackbacks

  1. mozilla plugins says:
    April 3, 2010 at 5:26 pm

    [...] out of date and need to be updated.Right now the Plugin-Check page can only be accessed through …Mozilla separates Firefox's plug-ins as different processes …In Dec 09, Mozilla talked about the out of process plugins' (OOP) architecture that could render [...]

  2. Microsoft bashes browser add-ons. Is it just poor self-defense? | TechExplorer says:
    April 9, 2010 at 10:09 am

    [...] it a coincidence that Mozilla released Firefox v3.6.4 (Lorentz) Beta today that’s capable to isolate each and every add-on process? That’s called a solution. Even, Chrome has to deal with hundreds of add-ons but it still is [...]