[kde-linux] Nspluginviewer

[Kevin Krammer]

On Monday 15 October 2007, David Baron wrote:
> This goodie was hanging up today. Moving it out of the $KDEDIR/bin path
> allowed konqueror to run normally and nothing seems to be missed.
>
> What is it and for what is it "needed"?

nspluginviewer is a helper process for running "Netscape" browser plugins (the 
browser plugin API is still called Netscape) outside the Konqueror process.

This allows Konqueror to be independent of any plugin's stability, i.e. if a 
plugin crashes or as in your case hangs, only the helper process will be 
affected but Konqueror itself will remain operational.

A recent plugin related issue is the bug in the Adobe Flash 9 plugin, which is 
triggered by a behavioral change in GTK2, resulting in nspluginviewer to 
consume 100% CPU time.

Since unfortunately Adobe seems not to be interested in fixing this any time 
soon and since nobody else can fix the closed-source plugin, there is quite 
some debate on several distributions' bug tracking systems if and how to work 
around it, e.g. for Debian
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=443600

It seems that the GTK packagers are now including a temporary work around 
until Adobe will eventually decide that Linux user should get at least a 
basic quality product again.

Shows nicely how proprietary software is not in the interest of consumers :(
Being at the mercy of an obviously merciless vendor.

Cheers,
Kevin

-- 
Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer
KDE user support, developer mentoring
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