Killing Flash But Not Firefox: Yes You Can (On 64-bit Debian)

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 16:31:35 GMT

Reading the Google Chrome comic book last week lead me to the following line of thoughts:

A: It would be nice if I can kill a tab as easily in Firefox as in Google Chrome.
B: Nah, I can't because everything runs in the same process.
A: But those darn Flash/Flex apps—they routinely eats 100% of my CPU and hang all tabs, all the time
B: Too bad they are in-proc. But wait, they aren't on 64-bit Debian.

Recall that Adobe provides their Flash plug-in for 32-bit Linux only. And to use it in 64-bit Linux, a nspluginwrapper is needed (as I reported 410 days ago.)

Yesterday, I got into one of those situations where Firefox is using 100% CPU and is not responding. I fired up SystemMonitor and sure enough, underneath firefox-bin there is a subprocess called nsviewer.bin. I killed the nsviewer.bin process and Firefox (well, IceWeasel, to be precise) became responsive again.

I was happy.

Flex 3 SDK and Silverlight: Is Java Applet An Idea Whose Time Has Come?

Tue, 01 May 2007 18:19:39 GMT

Twelve years after the original Java applet in the browser announcement, the march to a richer GUI runtime in the browser seems to be back on. On the heels of Adobe announcing the plan to open source its Flex 3 SDK, Microsoft entered the race with an open source (BSD-ish licensed) Silverlight, a cross-platform, cross-browser version of the .NET Windows Presentation Foundation.

All of a sudden, what didn't work a decade ago is being tauted as something new again. And this time, there are indications that the whole thing might just work.

Of course, Linux is absent from Microsoft's definition of cross-platform (Windows and Mac OS X is all they care about). Fortunately, it looks like the Mono project will do a Silverlight implementation:

Miguel de Icaza: It makes tons of sense for us to start looking at an implementation of Silverlight on Linux with Mono. There is already a XAML loader, it is the perfect excuse to use Antigrain for high-speed graphics and that only leaves the pesky media issue to be solved.

Now, what about Java? Are people so tired of the Java on the client story that we have already lost?

Not necessarily. It is true that Java in the browser has been neglected for many years. However, many of the basic ingredients that make up Flash or Silverlight are already there in Java.

If only someone can produce a stripped down version for the browsers.

Weiqi Gao's Observations - flex tag

Killing Flash But Not Firefox: Yes You Can (On 64-bit Debian)

Flex 3 SDK and Silverlight: Is Java Applet An Idea Whose Time Has Come?