Out-of-process plugins (OOPP) are now on by default in mozilla-central! Starting tomorrow morning, the mozilla-central nightly builds will load Flash and all other plugins in a separate process by default (on Windows and Linux). The Electrolysis team would love for people to test any plugins on their system, especially less-popular plugins.

Since we are moving relatively quickly with multi-process plugins, there are a few known issues to be aware of:

The plugin-crash UI is not finished. The current UI is just a non-localized dialog so that we can get crash reports from nightly testers. This will be changed soon!

On Windows, tearing/repainting issues when scrolling, bug 535295

On Linux, compiz effects and Flash don’t work together on some systems, bug 535612

On Windows, selecting “Print” option in Flash may lock up Firefox, bug 538918

On Windows, hulu won’t switch to full-screen mode, bug 539658

On Linux with GTK+-2.18 or later, GDK assertions and a fatal XError, bug 540197

Firefox-process crashes at NPObjWrapper_NewResolve with silverlight and sometimes Flash, bug 542263

If you discover crashes while running nightlies, please make sure you submit them, and check about:crashes for the crash ID and signature. We could use help making sure plugin-related crashes and instability are filed and tracked by searching for signatures here and filing bugs in the Core:Plug-Ins component.

If your browser hangs, you can probably recover by killing the mozilla-runtime process in the Windows task manager or via `kill` on Linux. If you are a developer with a debugger, please use the Mozilla symbol server and get stacks for both the Firefox process and the mozilla-runtime process and file a bug.

In some cases, it may be useful to the Electrolysis developers if you obtain a plugin log, which is a log of calls made between the plugin and the browser. Instructions for obtaining the log are available here.

I am very excited that we’ve made it this far, and I look forward to our next milestone release, which will backport these changes to the 1.9.2 release in preparation for Firefox Lorentz.

If for some reason you need to disable multi-process plugins, set the pref dom.ipc.plugins.enabled to false.