The days of Internet Explorer dominating the browser scene seem like a distant memory. While IE still owns a majority share of the browser market, many more choices have emerged and some, like Firefox, Chrome and Safari, have been gaining popularity.
As Datamation reports, there is a frenzy of developer activity designed to improve and bring new features to the various browsers. One of the efforts is to take a different approach to how plugins work with browsers. The aim is to improve the stability of the browser.
Browser vendors are always trying to improve the stability of their platforms. One key approach being adopted by multiple browser vendors is to take plugins out of the regular browser process and isolate them. The benefit of out-of-process plugins is that if a plugin, say Adobe’s Flash for example, crashes, the entire browser won’t crash.
Backers of the open source WebKit rendering engine, which is used by Google’s Chrome, Apple’s Safari and RIM’s upcoming new browser for Blackberry, are now testing out new out-of-process capabilities in WebKit2. Mozilla is out this week with Firefox Lorentz Beta which includes out-of-process plug-ins as well.
“WebKit2 is designed from the ground up to support a split process model, where the Web content (JavaScript, HTML, layout, etc) lives in a separate process,” Apple developer Anders Carlsson wrote in a mailing list posting. “This model is similar to what Google Chrome offers, with the major difference being that we have built the process split model directly into the framework, allowing other clients to use it.”
