* Jim Wiggs ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: > Folks, > > This entire situation with the Debian etch upgrade and the > issues with mozilla/firefox has been a real learning experience, > to say the least. We've put in several additional updates on bug > 306537, and in the process of that work we have identified the > probable culprit, which is the mplayerplug-in we had installed. > What we can't really figure out is how the mere *existence* of > the plugin can destabilize firefox/mozilla such that it will crash > even when "doing" things that don't involve the plugin. Usually > the crash would happen when an alert window came up that > tried to play a .wav file in an <embed> tag, but frequently it will > happen when loading an unrelated form or just resizing some > window. How can this be the case? Is this a known issue, and > being worked on? The fact that just having a plugin installed > can destabilize the browser so much seems to point out flaws > in the way the plugin system is designed.
It's a little surprising that it would cause instability when not in use, but plugins are mapped into the address space of the browser. It's not that shocking that it can do all sorts of unpleasant things to the browser. > As a result of this, we are reconfiguring our browsers to use > mozplugger instead. Our hope is that by virtue of the way that > mozplugger works, spawning external applications via /bin/sh, > it will have a much smaller effect on mozilla/firefox, since the > bulk of the extra code will be executing in a totally separate > process; if it crashes, well, the movie/sound/whatever won't > display, but mozilla/firefox (hopefully) will keep right on going. -- Eric Dorland <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ICQ: #61138586, Jabber: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 1024D/16D970C6 097C 4861 9934 27A0 8E1C 2B0A 61E9 8ECF 16D9 70C6
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