Web browsers, plugins, stability, processes (was: Recommendations...)

[Benjamin Scott]

On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 2:29 PM, Joshua Judson Rosen
<rozzin at geekspace.com> wrote:
> Unfortunately, there's now a native
> 64-bit Flash plugin and more recent versions of the `flashplugin-nonfree'
> package use that instead of using nspluginwrapper; so Flash is back
> to taking the browser down with it ...

  Firefox 3.6.4, currently in the late stages of beta, implements
out-of-process plugins (OOPP).  So when Flash explodes, locks up, goes
into an endless loop, etc., you can just kill off that one process,
and the browser is left intact.  I've been running it since it was in
the "nightly build" stage, for this feature alone.  It seems quite
stable at this point -- prolly even more so than 3.6.3, precisely
because of OOPP.  Recommended.

	http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html

	http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2010/04/20/firefox-3-6-4-beta-available-for-download-and-testing/

  There's also Google Chrome (or it's completely FOSS counterpart,
Chromium).  Not only is each plugin run in a separate process, each
page (tab/window) gets its own process, as does the UI.  So if a
single page has slow-to-render HTML or some wonky JavaScript/AJAX, it
doesn't drag the rest of the browser down with it.  It also means that
on a multi-processor/core system, it *really* flies.  Google is
calling the Linux version "stable" now; .deb's and .rpm's are
available, and they install the needed magic for yum/apt to
automatically update.

	http://www.google.com/chrome

	http://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/

-- Ben