Mozilla is hard at work on the next version of Firefox, and the latest alpha builds include out-of-process support for plugins.
“Plugins such as Flash and Silverlight run in a separate process from the browser. If a plugin crashes it will not crash the browser, and unresponsive plugins are automatically restarted” said an announcement from Mozilla.
Currently, out-of-process support is only available on Windows and Linux versions, with Mac support still under development. This is only the first step, with each tab also expected to be moved to it’s own process in time, much like rivals Internet Explorer and Chrome have already done.
You can download the new test version of Firefox from the Mozilla Developer News Blog.