Downloader: Firefox 3.6.6: because with 370 million users, sometimes you need a mulligan

Friday, July 23, 2010

Firefox 3.6.6: because with 370 million users, sometimes you need a mulligan

It's only been a few days since Firefox 3.6.4 was released, so the world was caught somewhat off-guard by news that Mozilla was pushing out Firefox 3.6.6 so quickly [what happened to 3.6.5?! -Ed]. The reason for the change: that fancy new out-of-process plugin system.

While the feature is designed to keep your browser from crashing when a plugin -- like Adobe Flash Player -- becomes unresponsive, Mozilla was a little overzealous with their initial timeout setting: 10 seconds. While that might be fine for Download Squad staff and readers, there are a whole lotta people running Firefox these days -- about 370 million of them.

That means, of course, that you'll find Firefox on all kinds of systems -- some of which can't load a Flash game like FarmVille in less than 10 seconds. Hence the quick patch: Mozilla bumped the timeout from 10 seconds to 45 seconds, allowing pokey 'puters everywhere to enjoy their favorite Time Wasters once again.

Huzzah!