Firefox Lorentz beta doesn't crash entirely when plug-ins get fussy
Admit it, your love for Firefox is tempered by sometimes sluggish performance and a penchant for perennial plugin crashes. Google did what it could with Chrome to isolate such issues by ensuring the entire browser didn't crash when Flash (or any other add-on, for that matter) went belly up. Now it looks like the gang at Mozilla are adopting a similar tactic, and if you want to try it out for yourself, the Lorentz beta is now available for download. So sayeth the site, "If a plugin crashes or freezes, it will not affect the rest of Firefox. You will be able to reload the page to restart the plugin and try again." Whodathunk we'd ever feel actual elation at such a proclamation?
























now just fix the google homepage and the comment system when i use forums plz firefox!!
other than that, good news all round :D
@HoldenMccrotch And some of the open vulnerabilities in the trackers which have existed for years...one of which now has me using Chrome.
WTF is Firefox?
Sincerely,
Chrome
@Mister Warmth Yeah, Chrome doesn't crash entirely either. I thought that was a standard feature, well it is on Chrome. So Firefox is that much closer to being a competitor with Google?
@Giuseppe
This is pretty much the only feature I can find that Chrome has over Firefox.
I run Firefox, Chrome and Opera regularly (mainly so I can have three separate accounts - my home account, my business account, and a logged out account - open on Google sites at the same time). In order of preference, it's still Firefox, Opera and then Chrome for me... with Chrome a *distant* third. There are just many things that annoy me about Chrome, from its non-standard navigation and interface (I literally cannot figure out how to do much of anything on Chrome) to its seriously poor performance to the fact that it seems to have a memory leak that forces me to restart it every couple of days.
Also, Flash runs REALLY poorly on it. Literally every time I wake from standby, if I have a Flash page open in Chrome, it crashes. I don't know who is to blame for that, but that never happens in Firefox. (I mean Firefox never crashes on me, whereas Flash on Chrome crashes *every* time I wake from standby.) So Chrome really needs this protection feature more than Firefox does.
@HoldenMccrotch
When is Firefox going to start innovating again? I love Mozilla, but it seems the past year or so they have just been playing catch-up (private browsing, moving to a more chrome-like interface, plugin isolations...)
@badasscat
i have no such problems with Chrome. It's been a nice step up from IE for me, and very intuitive with the usage of tabs. It's really as simple as it should be, maybe you just needed to spend a little more time with it.
@HoldenMccrotch So browsers are coming up with ways to deal with the Flash plug-in after it crashes? Man if Apple could only, oh wait...
Flash has crashed? Shocker!
;)
@grandmainger
"Flash (or any other add-on, for that matter)"
congratulations, another chance to attack flash and you did it without thinking :)
@grandmainger
The only few times Flash crashed for me was when I used chrome...
IE8 is the most stable browser I use and Firefox is second, Chrome is just horrible in stablity+ resource management.
@Beastage flash + proxy == instant crash on ie nearly everytime.. quite annoying :)
@grandmainger For some strange reason that icon reminded me of the Sad Mac icons...
@Beastage Best be wiping the Balmer juice off your chin. It's extremely unflattering.
@grandmainger
Acutally the only plugin that locks by bowser up and then crashes it more times than I care to mention is Quicktime. As well as displaying a completely black bar where the controls should be. Been happening on Vista and Windows7 for years, Apple haven't bothered to fix it.
You installed Quicktime?! One must not do that. Apple's answer to RealPlayer.
Install Quicktime Alternative, if you must.
@Howzer Yea QuickTime locks up more than half the time on my vista machine too.
@lakersin2025
it's cause you have a Vista machine
@espentan
you realise QuickTime predates realplayer by several years.
That's just copying Google Chrome!
@pankomputerek No, it's a smart design choice. Don't get me wrong,my favourite browser is Chrome, it is just that your kind of thinking doesn't benefit anyone and is kinda douchy.
Yes lets start making workarounds for all this flash crap. Why not get rid of it all together...
@ninja98
Have you been using Chrome with HTML5? have you noticed how much cpu it consumes while doing so? on desktop it doesn't matter much but on laptops... babye battery.
@Beastage So lets assume all potential alternatives that are just being developed will be crap as well and take that as a reason to keep the hideous flash runtime....? Don't think so...
Its time to move on and innovate on open standards. Adobe had years to get their stuff sorted. They failed.
@ninja98
Flash: an inherently short-lived but nonetheless powerful brightness that can cause temporary blindness. Alt: behavior or style of an individual for the sake of attracting attention.
HTML5: a promise unrealised (yet).
@ninja98
I don't understand why people have this inherent distaste for non-HTML/CSS/Javascript. So what if it's proprietary? How does that affect YOU. The problem with Flash is that it's written poorly. If it were written well, I'd have no problem with it and I don't think anyone else should either.
@MrDiSante
Apple would have a problem with Flash if it was the tightest and best written code ever produced. They don't want cross-platform, proprietary run-time environments period. I'm sure Steve Jobs would like to create a walled garden for Mac OS X but the horse long bolted from that option.
@ninja98 While FF may be the best browser, the only good browser for HTML5 is Safari, best support and most features
As a Firefox user, this is great news! Admittedly, I'm not a fan of Chrome at all. I'm fine with IE and Firefox at the top 2 spots:)
Here is an interesting question:
Does this prevent firefox from becoming hijacked from a website?
From my experience, some websites will demand that you install some "add-on" in order to view one of their videos. You're given the option of Yes or Cancel. Of course if you're smart you will select NO.. but doing that will cause that menu to pop up again...and again.. and you can't exit out of it at all... or close the tab... and the menus and all other functions in firefox become locked out. The ONLY way out of that is to start up the Task Manager and kill the firefox process. The bad thing about that is... if you have firefox set up to open the last tabs used... then you will be taken back to that "shady" website and become locked out all over again unless you quickly close the tab before that page loads up.
Now that is what I would like firefox to prevent from happening... So does anyone know if this will offer protection from that?
Stop visiting those sites. Use youp*rn or redtube instead.
Don't blame firefox for installing a virus... lol
@user47alpha
Dude... when "surfing" pron sites, you are redirected sometimes to those shady sites... there is no way of telling if it's one of those shady sites until AFTER those prompts appear.. they appear as soon as the page loads. And NO, I have never installed any of those add-ons.. So my question remains... can this new beta version of firefox prevent the hijacking.. and yes, I already use NoScript.
@SBMfromLA
Thats what I tell you: use those and not some "underground" sites und you will not be redirected or asked to install a "plugin"
@user47alpha
Wow...there's always someone who feels a need to show off their ignorance with irrelevant comments, huh?
Its free software, so I do not complain.
Funny, I never got flash crashed on my two-year-old laptop.
Funny i work at Adobe...
@WinRulez
LOL
@masochist I also have never seen flash crash in firefox.
@masochist It happened to me 2 weeks ago, In my Windows 7 64bit but Flash player was causing the problem, cos' it crashed when I opened a YouTube video on ANY web browser: Firefox, Opera, Safari, IE8, and Chrome. I had to uninstall AdobeFlashPlayer, and reinstall it.
@masochist That's odd, Flash never crashes for me either.
oh wait I run the FlashBlock extension...
:)
Seriously, I do run FlashBlock on all my computers, but I also fairly frequently use flash-based sites - youtube, bbc iplayer etc - and Flash still never crashes. Then again, actually Firefox basically never crashes for me at all, so...
Still, I definitely approve of anything that makes it more robust (at least if there's no major increase in resource consumption), because even rare crashes are annoying if they happen.
PS Is it just me or did anyone else see those poster ads for Chrome a few months back - '13 tabs, 0 crashes, 1 browser' - and think 'wtf only 13 tabs?!'
The only browser I've regularly used that had massive compatibility problems and crashes was Google Chrome.
Chrome sure is fast when it works, but thats not often, so I hope Firefox isn't getting too many ideas from them.
@Ducman69
really?
@eddib you haven't noticed that sites and applications that work perfectly in Firefox aren't displaying properly in chrome? o_O message boards, my bank, forms, our companies ticketing system and learning portal, and game sites often fail to load or crash in chrome.
stuff that does work, has great performance, like hulu.
I'll try the latest version, but clearly they were suffering some growing pains especially obvious on the embarrassment of getting a popup error asking you to install firefox or IE when trying to install the google toolbar on chrome... rofls.
firefox is still king, but the big appeal of its vast plugins is also usually what causes problems w/ peeps running too many.
@Ducman69
Chrome will use Webkit2 very shortly. Problem solved. Good to see Firefox/Gecko adopt this type of protection.
@Ducman69
no problems so far, using chrome on pc and mac
can't compare to firefox, never really used it. before chrome, i used opera.
This is great news! But I would be more happy if they would fix the zooming. It's very ugly, with artifacts and stuff.
People always overlook the fact that Safari isolates plugins too, on Snow Leopard. Just mentioning it for the sake of fairness. This is good news!
Has anyone notice that websites are loading *really* slowly after updating to this Firefox build?
@shmootz
that was weird... seems to have suddenly returned to its normal speed