301278 - firefox crashes and all my windows die (request for multi-process browsing)

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 260107

(Toolkit :: Startup and Profile System, enhancement)

Description

[Lincoln Ramsay]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050225 Firefox/1.0.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050225 Firefox/1.0.1

Sorry for the **** summary. This may already have been reported but I can't find it.

The problem is that because firefox is not multi-process, it takes out all my
windows when it crashes. I can't remember the last time Safari crashed on me. If
firefox was similarly well behaved it wouldn't be a problem. (yeah, I know, it's
not necessarily firefox's problem in the first place).

It seems to me that the easiest way to help prevent losing data would be to run
firefox multi-process. This is made difficult because firefox doesn't support
profile sharing. I'd have to keep track of which window came from which profile
(which is almost impossible) and remember to propogate changes beteeen profiles
or simply make no changes to the profile.

Is anyone at mozilla.org interested in some kind of easy multi-process for firefox?

I guess another thing would be to "dump state" periodically so that the windows
could be restored after a crash.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. have lots of windows open with important data in them
2. crash a firefox window

Actual Results:  
all the windows are gone and all the data in them is not recoverable

Expected Results:  
either the other windows should not go away (multi-process) or the data should
be recoverable

I wouldn't be supprised if this is considered a non-issue. The effort spent to
implement this would be effectively wasted if firefox became as crash-proof as
Safari is.

Comment 1

[Jo Hermans]

Safari isn't multi-process either (and it also crashes).

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 260107 ***