Firefox 3.6.6, an update to crash protective 3.6.4, is released now

Firefox has released an updated to the recently released crash-free Firefox 3.6.4. The crash protection feature successfully prevented the crashing of third party plugins - Microsoft Silverlight, Adobe's Flash etc to affect the browsers. In case of freezes though, it used to wait for 10 second as a default timeout before terminating the plugin. Firefox 3.6.6 is released to address this timeout.

Firefox 3.6.4 makes use of the out-of-process plugins, aka OOPP, to ensure crash protection. In case you are confused, there is a difference between plugins crashing and freezing. Crash is when a plugin stops working and terminates; freeze is when it becomes unresponsive and can no longer interact with the user. Plugin freezes make the whole browser unresponsive. So, Firefox 3.6.4 used to wait for 10 seconds for the unresponsive plugin to respond after which it killed the plugin.

This strategy sounds good but the default time was a little too short for old computers. Some users had complained that they expect longer period of non-responsiveness from the plugin while playing games. So, Firefox 3.6.6 has been released as an automatic update to address this issue by raising the default timeout from 10 to 45 seconds.

This bug was reported as "Increased Hang Detector Timeout". Users were complaining about not able to play Farmville, this was because Farmville used to hang the browser long enough for timeout to trigger and kill it.