905073 - rename Firefox child process from 'plugin-container' to 'firefox-child' or similar

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1114647

(Core :: IPC, defect)

Description

[Mark Hammond [:markh] [:mhammond]]

Most people would be totally unaware of child processes, but those who are aware might appreciate a better process name than 'plugin-container'.  Eg, "power users" wouldn't need to google this "strange process" they see in task manager.  Developers might like the processes grouped together for interacting with them in the task manager or debugger.  It's no longer used just to host plugins.

(I'm half expecting WONTFIX, but I figured it can't hurt to see :)

Comment 1

[Kan-Ru Chen [:kanru] (UTC+9)]

Agree!

Comment 2

[David Anderson [:dvander] - inactive, e-mail if emergency]

Yeah, we definitely should fix this in the long-term for e10s. The most common first comment I hear from users so far is "where are the processes? All I see is plugin-container"

Comment 3

[Benjamin Smedberg]

I'd take a patch for this. The risk is mostly making sure that all of our testing and error reporting bits are correct, making sure that removed-files removes the old version, and such.

Really what I want is for all the processes to be firefox.exe and remove the extra binary (use a command-line flag to flip behavior). I'd take that patch too!

But note why it was originally changed, history in bug 558190.

Comment 5

[Jed Davis [:jld] ⟨⏰|UTC-7⟩ ⟦he/him⟧]

(In reply to Benjamin Smedberg  [:bsmedberg] from comment #3)
> Really what I want is for all the processes to be firefox.exe and remove the
> extra binary (use a command-line flag to flip behavior). I'd take that patch
> too!

Is there anything from bug 977026 that could help here, maybe?  As I understand it that made the "b2g" executable able to fork and call the plugin-container entry point without exec()ing plugin-container, so it would also allow the same executable to be a parent process or a child process.  I don't know how platform-specific the implementation of that is, though.

Comment 6

[Mark Hammond [:markh] [:mhammond]]

Bug 1114647 has tracking setup, so that one wins!