94532 - [RFE] Prevent crashes in XPCOM plugins from crashing Mozilla

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 36272

(Core Graveyard :: Plug-ins, enhancement)

Description

[Christian Schaller]

Hi, I have a testing plugin which doesn't work very well yet. Which is of course
not Mozilla's problem, but I guess that even bad plugins should not be allowed
to freeze/segfault mozilla. 
The troublesome plugin is http://mozstreamer.mozdev.org and it crashes my
mozilla each time I try to access the included test.html page. The plugin code
is available from CVS.

Comment 1

[Christian Schaller]

Attachment: Code of plugin which crashes mozilla

Comment 2

[Grey Hodge (jX)]

I'm not on Linux, but maybe the problem really IS with the plugin? Major crasher
bug?

Comment 3

[Grey Hodge (jX)]

*** Bug 94493 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 4

[av (gone)]

Everybody can write a plugin which crashes Mozilla or even OS. The idea is to 
try to catch those crashes early and survive. We something like that on Windows.  
This bug is a dup. I'll find it if nobody finds it faster.

Comment 5

[Grey Hodge (jX)]

Ignore that dupe, my bad, wrong bug #. Feel free to hit me.

Comment 6

[av (gone)]

Serge, you sure know what it is a dup of...

Comment 7

[serge (gone)]

no, this is not a legacy plugin, this is xpcom plugin,
it's unlikely to be a dup.

Comment 8

[av (gone)]

Is the 'dup' we have limited to legacy plugins only? 

Comment 9

[Christian Schaller]

Not sure if I have understood the comments made here, is this to be considered a
bug or is it impossible to design Mozilla in such a was as to make it next to
impossible for plugins to crash the whole browser?

Comment 10

[Peter Lubczynski]

Currently, almost all calls to 4.x-style plugins on PC-based systems (except
OS/2) use exception handling to catch a crash inside the plugin. This code is
located in:
http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/modules/plugin/base/src/nsPluginSafety.h
You can play around with that and see if it helps.

I think extending this to XPCOM-style plugins will not be easy because AFAIK
exception handeling is looked down upon in mozilla. I'm personally in favor of
using exceptions in specific spots, but it would require a group effort.

Comment 11

[Christopher Aillon (sabbatical, not receiving bugmail)]

The "dupe" everyone is thinking about sounds like bug 36272 

Comment 12

[av (gone)]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 36272 ***

Comment 13

[shrirang khanzode]

mass duplicate verifications . For filtering purposes, pls use keywd
"massdupverification"