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Apple touted Safari 4 as having a crash protection feature (similar to that provided by Google Chrome), wherein the crash of a browser plugin (ahem, Flash) would not bring down the whole browser, but just the pane or possibly the tab containing the offending plugin content.

Is this actually feature working for anyone? Safari still regularly crashes and burns for me due to Flash content -- is there a setting I need to enable?

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In Snow Leopard, Safari 4 will run Flash as an separate process, so that if/when Flash crashes, the rest of Safari won't be affected. You need to be running Snow Leopard, though; Safari 4 in OS 10.5 Leopard still runs Flash as a plugin, and Flash crashes will still crash the entire browser.

Here's a screenshot from the page "Apple - Mac OS X Snow Leopard - Refining the user experience":

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Moreover, here's a quote from this press release from Apple:

In Mac OS® X Snow Leopard™, available later this year, Safari runs as a 64-bit application, boosting the performance of the Nitro JavaScript engine by up to 50 percent.** Snow Leopard makes Safari more resistant to crashes by running plug-ins in a separate process, so even if a plug-in crashes, Safari continues to run and the user simply has to reload the affected page.

I can't speak to why this new feature is 10.6-only, but it seems pretty clear that it is.

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  • Do you have a reference link on this? I don't remember Apple saying this was a 10.6-only feature. If it is the case, I wonder what 10.6 is providing in the OS that makes this not possible in 10.5.
    – arathorn
    Aug 8, 2009 at 21:21
  • Thanks for the link. I do still wonder why the feature seems to require 10.6.
    – arathorn
    Aug 8, 2009 at 22:44
  • Your screenshot's broken. Aug 8, 2009 at 23:37
  • Also, I think it's a 10.6-only feature because of the new operating system features of Snow Leopard. It's probably not that it's not possible in Leopard, it's just that it's easier in Snow Leopard, with Grand Central and all. That would be my guess. Aug 8, 2009 at 23:39
  • How is the screenshot broken? Seems fine to me. Aug 9, 2009 at 2:46
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I think this is a feature of Snow Leopard, rather than Safari itself. That said, it might be enabled on the latest Webkit builds.

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