230017 - RFE: Run plugins in a separate thread

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core Graveyard :: Plug-ins, enhancement)

Description

[Roland Mainz]

RFE: Run plugins in a seperate thread(s; one per plugin) to decouple them from
other activities in the browser.

Currently a very busy Flash plugin (like a fast endless animation) can make all
other tasks in the browser/mail/news/calendar very sluggish. Moving the plugin
into a seperate thread (and for X11 platforms: A seperate Xserver connection
opened with XOpenDisplay()) would greatly improve that situation (a good example
for the performance improvements is "Konqueror" which runs plugins in a seperate
process - in most cases this design outperforms Mozilla by magnitudes (just test
it yourself via running multiple Flash animations from
http://www.happytreefriends.com/ in parallel)).

Comment 1

[tenthumbs]

Really should be a carefully sanitized separate process for security. There's 
no reason to assume plugins are benign.

Comment 2

[Roland Mainz]

Running NS4.x-style plugins in a seperate process may be possible, but running
plugins which use the new XPCOM-based Mozilla API in a seperate process would be
a horrible pain since _EVERYTHING_ the plugin accesses would have to be
transferred between the two processes (I am not even sure whether the new plugin
API actually allows this... please anyone correct me if I am wrong...).

Comment 3

[Andreas Kunz]

closely related to bug 156493

Comment 4

[Andreas Kunz]

Roland, concerning your Whiteboard entry:
1) there already is a bug about separate processes, so I see no point in asking
people to file another one.
2) when I said "related", I meant it (not dup, or I had said it). I don't know
how close the relationship is, though, but I guess there is one...

Comment 5

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

*** Bug 269679 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 6

[Jim Bray]

  Seems like an excellent use of threads if technically feasible.

Comment 7

[Ilya Konstantinov]

Are our XPCOM services, by defintion, thread-safe?

Comment 8

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

*** Bug 240852 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 10

[timeless]

(In reply to comment #7)

on average they are not and most be accessed using a proxy.

Comment 11

[timeless]

erm, must :(

Comment 12

[Aaron Lawrence]

Better to go for a separate process and get better protection; a thread might sole responsiveness, but would not solve other problems like crashes.
That's bug 156493