372021 - Plugins often crash browser - should be sandboxed

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 230017

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[andrew]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-GB; rv:1.8.1.2pre) Gecko/20070111 SeaMonkey/1.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-GB; rv:1.8.1.2pre) Gecko/20070111 SeaMonkey/1.1

Very often, a problem in a third-party plugin causes Firefox (or Seamonkey, or Mozilla) to crash, losing all open pages and forms.

I have often seen this with the Mplayer plugin - when a movie ends, and the plugin terminates, the browser crashes. Recently, the Adobe Flash 9 plugin for Linux often crashes the browser

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Visit a page with particular Flash content
2. Flash content plays
3.
Actual Results:  
Browser crashes

Expected Results:  
Ideal: software never crashes

Reality: Plugin crashes in its own process or thread. Browser generates popup
saying so. Browser continues to run. Plugin reloads as required on different page

I suspect this is unfixable with the way plugins currently work as dynamically loadable libraries. But the browser is essentially held hostage to software from third-party developers, and it makes Mozilla look bad because from the users's point of view, the browser crashed. It would be nice if somehow it were possible to protect the browser from segfaults and memory violations in plugins.

Comment 2

[timeless]

or bug 156493 depending on which bug the reporter wanted to duplicate (you shouldn't duplicate bugs and you should search before filing..., and you should /try/ to pick a reasonable component...)