---

Those enterprising lads and ladettes at Mozilla have released Firefox 3.6.6 (release notes), which addresses a single issue — how long a plugin (i.e. Flash) needs to hang before the browser’s newly implemented Lorentz crash protection kills the process. Thereupon, the time out has been increased from 10 seconds to 45 seconds, mostly to account for folks running the browser on older hardware.

That said, Lorentz crash protection arrived in Firefox 3.6.4 for Windows and Linux, though it’s not expected in the Mac version until v4.0 because this functionality requires a big rewrite of the browser. So, no, the issue and the fix don’t apply to Mac users.

If that weren’t interesting enough — why create and release a fix for the Mac for a feature that isn’t even there? — Mozilla’s motivation for putting out this patch is pretty darned funny.

Mozilla’s silver implement

“…we are seeing an increasing number of reports that some users are unable to play Farmville, because Farmville [Ed — Flash] hangs the browser long enough for out timeout to trigger and kill it. As an interm solution, we can increase the timeout and then look for a better solution. [It's been suggested] that 30 seconds is a good value, so let’s hit this with a big hammer and make it 45s.”

So, dear Mac users, go ahead and download Firefox 3.6.6 (17.6MB) and be reassured that Mozilla is doing everything it can to keep your Windows and Linux cousins in the game…

What’s your take?