Out-of-process plug-in in Firefox

Firefox 3.6.4 code named Lorentz has been released for beta this week. It is quite different from its previous versions 3.6.3 and 3.6.2 where in the primary focus was on security issues. The main feature of Lorentz is “Out-of-process plug-in”. Something which we have been waiting for, something which Chrome already has.

Out-of-process plug-in. What is it?

Firefox uses the same process to run its core process as well the plug-ins. If any of the plug-in crashes, so does Firefox . Same is the case with tabs. With this new feature, all the plug-ins like Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime, Microsoft Silverlight, etc will run inside a separate plug-in container. If a crash in one of these plug-ins happens, Firefox will continue to run and users will be able to submit a crash report before reloading the page to try again. This will reduce the number of Firefox crashes to a greater extent. “Per-Process browsing” (Process per tab) feature is still not available in Firefox 3.6.4 -- Varun