(We’re recovering from a slight loss of internet, so pardon the excess of posts.)

Two days ago, Mozilla shipped Firefox 3.6.4 to users around the world.

Firefox 3.6.4 – which shipped 83 days after Firefox 3.6.3 – is a release that has been plagued with delays due to its inclusion of a brand new feature, Crash Protection.

Crash Protection is Mozilla’s first foray into making Firefox multi-process. Firefox 4 will likely include full multi-process for tabs, plug-ins, and extensions. In this first implementation, Firefox is protected from some plug-in crashes on two of its three supported platforms. According to the FAQ:

Crash protection is the name of the Firefox capability based on Gecko’s out of process plugins technology. It first shipped in Firefox 3.6.4 for Windows and Linux only, running Adobe Flash, Apple QuickTime and Microsoft Silverlight in a separate process called plugin-container.

During this release, a lot was learned about shipping new features in what have traditionally been stability and security updates. Christian Legnitto, a project manager with the Mozilla Corporation, intends to give a talk at the Mozilla Summit 2010 discussing what was learned.

The next release of Firefox will be version 3.6.6, skipping 3.6.5 so that the mobile version of Firefox can use it. The release will be set to fix problems with the new Crash Protection as well as fix security issues before the popular BlackHat and Defcon conferences at the end of the July.