Firefox Lorentz Beta comes with Out of Process Plugin integration

Firefox Lorentz Beta has been released for Public testing. This release comes up with some performance and web developer improvements. The best part being the introduction of out-of-process Plugins which will prevent flash or silverlight plugins crashes to freeze the whole firefox process. This feature is being considered as a major stability and performance improvement in Firefox Browser.

This feature is similar to Chrome's isolated tab process method. A single freezed/crashed tab won't affect the whole browser. So, the next time either Flash or Apple quicktime or Microsoft's Silverlight plugin crashes, instead of taking down the whole browser with it, you will see this error in the respective tab.

At this point, the user can submit the crash report and reload the page.

Please note that this feature, as of now, is only present for Windows and Linux Firefox users. The aim of this preview release is to get wider testing and feedbacks. This feature currently only works for these three plugins - flash, quicktime and silverlight. But you can use this method, shared on Mozilla-Links to enable it for other plugins.

Right now, it only runs QuickTime, Flash, and Silverlight on their own process, but you can also manually add other plugins via about:config.

For example to have the Adobe Reader plugin running on its own process, create a boolean preference in about:config, name it dom.ipc.plugins.enabled.nppdf32.dll, set it to true, and restart. For Java, the preference must be named  dom.ipc.plugins.enabled.npjp2.dll. You just need to know the name of the library (which you get from about:plugins), and create the preference accordingly.

Conversely, you can disable OOPP for specific plugins (even enabled by default ones) by setting their respective preference to false.

You can download the beta here.