
Finally Mozilla released Firefox 3.6.4 final with Out- Of Process Plug-in (OOPP) dubbed as crash protection feature.Crash Protection feature now available in Firefox 3.6.4 for Windows and Linux only, Crash protection will be available for Mac OS X in Firefox 4.
What is Out of Process Plug-in and its need
Firefox users always concerned about Firefox because its not stable and crashes too often.Mozilla identified outdated third party plugins pose security risk and also can crash Firefox down.Mozilla started to warn Firefox users to update their Flash player plug-in through update notification.
Mozilla started Plugin check service which shows Plug-in update status and from Firefox 3.6 onwards Firefox automatically alerts users if their plugins are out-of-date.Other browsers users can also check their plugins status with Plugin Check .
There are still problems with Firefox due to plugins like Adobe Flash Player, which causes entire browser session to crash when a plug-in on a Webpage becomes unresponsive or hangs.
Mozilla hopes Firefox with Crash Protection will reduce crashes
Mozilla started Out Of Process Plug-in project which runs popular third party plug-ins like Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime and Microsoft Silverlight plugins in a separate process called plugin- container.
With this feature when a plug-in crashes while using Firefox with Crash Protection it does not affect rest of Firefox , Firefox 3.6.4 will provide uninterrupted browsing that means the browser will keep running and specific portions of website controlled by Plugins will be disabled.You can able to reload the page to restart the plugin and try again.
Mozilla states that Firefox 3.6.4 with crash protection will significantly reduce the number of crashes faced by Firefox users while while watching online videos or playing games.When a plug-in crashes or freezes using while using Firefox user can enjoy uninterrupted browsing by simple refreshing the page.
Presently Firefox offers crash protection for Adobe Flash,Apple Quicktime and for Microsoft Silverlight on Windows and Linux Computers.Support for other plugins and operating systems will be available in future release of Firefox.It is recommended to all users to update to latest version to reduce number of crashes in Firefox , you can click Help menu and click Check for updates to update to latest version.