Firefox “Lorentz” provides uninterrupted browsing for Windows and Linux users when there is a crash in the Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime or Microsoft Silverlight plugins. Plugins such as Flash and Silverlight run in a separate process from the browser. If a plugin crashes it will not crash the browser, and unresponsive plugins are automatically restarted. However this preview release does not have a Mac version.

The process-isolation feature has been in Google’s Chrome from the beginning. Chrome sandboxes individual tabs, crashes of one tab does not affect the running of the rest of Chrome browser. Firefox currently isolate only Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime and Microsoft Silverlight, but will eventually isolate all plugins running on a page.

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A beta of the Firefox “Lorentz” project is now available for download and public testing. Firefox “Lorentz” takes the out of process plugins work from Mozilla Developer Previews and builds it on top of Firefox 3.6.3. Users can submit a plugin crash report, and then reload the page to restart the plugin and try again.

Mozilla encourages users to test Firefox “Lorentz” on their favorite websites, and give them feedback by filing a bug or filling out this form. Help from the community in evaluating these beta releases is important. Users who install Firefox “Lorentz” will eventually be automatically updated to a future version of Firefox 3.6 in which this feature is included.

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Tags: Browser, Firefox