Flash isolation technology hits Firefox 3.6.4 beta

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 21 Apr 2010 at 11:01

Mozilla has released the first beta of Firefox 3.6.4, which is designed to prevent browser crashes by running Flash and other plugins as separate processes.

The technology was previewed in the Firefox Lorentz release, but this is the first time it has been folded into the principal Firefox development branch.

Lorentz runs Flash, Quicktime and Silverlight plugins as separate processes meaning that should one of these plugins crash, the entire browser doesn't go with it.

Instead, Firefox loads a page explaining what's happened and submits a crash report to Mozilla. Broken plugins won't be relaunched until you reload the page, with the company claiming this approach causes less hassle than reloading them automatically.

The beta is available to Windows, Linux and Mac OS X users, but the process isolation feature is limited to Windows and Linux users for the time being.

However, the feature may make it into the Mac version in time for the final release, which is slated for May.