Stating from version 3.6.6 in the Firefox was included
plugin-container.exe to prevent browser crash.
If you run more than one Firefox window (does'n not matter how many tabs opened in every window) you can see that
plugin-container.exe exists under
FireFox.exe process (you can see it if you use
ProcessExplorer by Sysinternals instead of standard
Task Manager). Then you may find that something making slow down your computer. If it is so, it may be due to
plugin-container.exe. Next versions of Firefox (up to latest 3.6.12) load certain plugins in a separate process (
plugin-container.exe) to provide you uninterrupted browsing even when certain plugins stops working. But the problem is,
plugin-container.exe may use a lot of memory and slow down your computer (up to 48% of CPU constantly). You may experience the problem more often while viewing online flash videos.
Do you want to disable or stop plugin-container.exe in Firefox 3.6.6 or higher? Follow these steps:
- Open Firefox web browser.
- Type about:config in the address bar and press Enter key.
- A warning will appear. Ignore it and press the “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button.
- In the opened Filter field type dom.ipc. Six preferences will appear for the filter dom.ipc.
- Ignore first and last preferences (dom.ipc.plugins.enabled and dom.ipc.plugins.timeoutSecs). Double-click each of the four remaining preferences to change the value from “true” to “false“.
Note:The crash protection feature in Firefox 3.6 is enabled for certain plugins only. The four preferences that you modified here specifies four different out-of-process plugins. They are the the
NPAPI test plugin,
Adobe Flash,
Apple QuickTime and
Microsoft Silverlight. These plugins are specified in a separate
dom.ipc.plugins.enabled.<filename> preference by default is set to true. You can disable them by changing their value to false. And thus
plugin-container.exe will not run. By default the first preference
dom.ipc.plugins.enabled is already set to “false”. So, no need to touch it. The
dom.ipc.plugins.timeoutSecs is also not important here as other values are false.