Moz tweaks extension crash controls in Firefox

Mozilla has tweaked the crash protection features in Firefox with a new release of the open source browser.

Firefox 3.6.6, released on Saturday, increases the amount of time that plugins are allowed to be non-responsive before they are terminated, as explained here. The stability update follows last week's release of Firefox 3.6.4, which fixed four critical security bugs including a memory corruption flaw.

The release introduced a feature that sought to minimize crashes by running plug-ins as processes separate from the core browser. Plug-ins that stop responding to calls from the browser were terminated after 10 seconds.

However this "hang detector" for plug-ins beyond Flash, Quicktime and Silverlight was found to be too sensitive, causing problems for users of Farmville and video service Hulu. Reports of problems prompted a decision to increase the time that extensions are given to respond to 45 seconds in Firefox 3.6.6. ®