Mozilla came yesterday with a beta version of Firefox 3.6.4. Despite the increase in version number does not indicate major changes, this version of the browser include an important new function.
The feature is called "Out-of-process plugins (OOPP) and is the first result of Mozilla's electrolysis project which, among other things, to give Firefox a better support for multicore processors, but more important is that different tasks in the browser will be able to run more independently of each other. This should provide better stability, because each task is given a separate process.
The Firefox 3.6.4 to make sure is that the browser plug-ins such as Flash Player, Java, QuickTime and Silverlight runs in a different process than the rest of the browser. If the plug-in crashes, not the entire browser freezes. Instead, replace plug-in display of a dialog that tells about the crash. The rest of the browser will work as before the crash.
This means that the plug before the crash far less important for Firefox users than before.
The dialogue that appears in the upcoming Firefox releases, if a plug-in crash.
As the electrolysis project will continue in his work, the more parts of Firefox are separated into separate processes. This will probably mean that the actual user interface and browser extensions may be separated into one or more separate processes. Also plan to distribute the views of Web content on multiple processes. How this distribution to occur, does not seem to be settled yet. It is proposed however to do this either by tab, and tab group, or per domain.
Firefox 3.6.4 beta is available on this page.
