Has Firefox just one upped Chrome? Rolls Out Multi-Process Plugins

At least once in your lifetime, you must have cursed the browser for losing all your ‘important’ data on all those tabs due a crappy unstable plugin or website causing a disastrous browser crash. Well since Chrome runs tabs, plugins and now even extensions in separate process they surely have learnt and limited the crashes to the due to web pages or plugins.

With the help of Extensions, Chrome has tried to push themselves ahead  in the ever going ‘browser war’, but now Firefox has fought back by adding one of Chrome’s most prominent features.

The latest Minefield Update added the support of Multi-Process Plugins, which allows for running plugins in separate processes. Just a simple change in the “about:config” page of latest Firefox Nightly build, a feature could be enabled to run plugins in separate processes, though its still in the Firefox Nightly build as there are still some serious bugs to be fixed.

“But if you are willing to suffer some temporary instability, we could really use some help testing Minefield nightlies with out-of-process plugins (OOPP). Currently only Windows and Linux support multi-process plugins: mac support requires additional work. To turn OOPP on, visit about:config, find the pref dom.ipc.plugins.enabled, set it to true, and restart your browser. ” says Benjamin Smedberg.

Go ahead try and test it,

• Visit here and download the latest build.
• Visit about:config
• Search for dom.ipc.plugins.enabled
• Double Click on it and Set it to true

Now once you’ve restarted the browser you should see plugins load in a separate process under the process name ‘mozilla-runtime.exe’

Being still under development, you might face some bugs but as of now not many bugs are being reported other than plugin incompatibility or issues like that.

Make sure you try forcefully crashing the plugins or ‘mozilla-runtime.exe’ . Aw Snap !!!