Firefox 3.6.4: Out-of-process plugins landing soon in Firefox as a minor update

[Night Owl]

Mozilla has been working on bolting on a little Chrome-style crash proofing through the use of out-of-process plugins. Doing so will mean that Firefox users, too, can endure crashes by things like Flash Player, Adobe Reader, and Java, without their entire browsing session going for a dirt nap.

According to minutes posted from a recent platform meeting, the change will arrive in the upcoming Firefox 3.6.4 update. The public beta announcement will be made in the next few days, though you can already download builds from the Mozilla Nightly FTP if you'd rather not wait. By the beginning of next month the update should be available in-browser for existing Mozilla users. They've pegged May 4th as the day 3.6.4 final will ship.

This is a fairly big change in update philosophy from Mozilla. In the past, a new feature as significant as out-of-process-plugins would never have been slated for a minor release such as 3.6.4. However, with Google furiously pushing updates to Chrome, an impressive Opera 10.5x on the market, and IE9 generating buzz Mozilla can't afford to be complacent.

O-o-p-p is a good place to start -- now let's see that proposed change for the Javascript engine and no-restart extensions!

Source: DownloadSquad

[Sl@pSh0ck™]

been testing FF 3.6.3plugin1 which is kinda "beta" version of FF 3.6.4 ... so far it is not so resource friendly :frusty:

[eXtortiOn]

been trying few addons nothing working well to reduce memory usage on FF 3.6.3

[Bizarre™]

I've been waiting for this.

I hope they polish it before release.

[JessicaLeigh]

Hello Owl, Biz,

Shouldn't we be seeing the results of their OOPP efforts in the nightly builds? :unsure:

[SacredCultivator]

Well they are implemented int eh nightlies and as nivrid mentioned, doesn't seem to be that efficient, so definitely hope they polish it up when it comes to public release.

It's a good idea but now with Chrome improving itself greatly, Firefox has a lot to work with to continue being a great browser.

[DKT27]

I just hope that it has more benefits than the problems.

We all know IE has done that, it used more memory than any browser on my computer when IE8 was released.

[Bizarre™]

@DKT27:

Indeed ^_^