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Lately firefox has been sucking up my system memory where the plugin container is twice the size of the actual browser

  • 4 replies
  • 8 have this problem
  • 1 view
  • Last reply by cor-el

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Basically all I run on my system is facebook, an online radio player and aim while I work in my home office. My flash player is always updated, I have no ads, spyware or viruses. firefox uses about 2MB of memory and the plugin container can be using up to 6MB depending. between these two applications, 60% of my system memory is being used at any given time.

Basically all I run on my system is facebook, an online radio player and aim while I work in my home office. My flash player is always updated, I have no ads, spyware or viruses. firefox uses about 2MB of memory and the plugin container can be using up to 6MB depending. between these two applications, 60% of my system memory is being used at any given time.

All Replies (4)

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Are you sure you got those numbers correct? 2MB and 6MB isn't all that much, especially since minimum system requirements for Firefox 7 is 512MB.

How much RAM do you have installed?

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Firfox has started lagging. I was once a big fan of firefox but now i m moving to Google Chrome, a very light weight browsing experience. Firefox lags while starting, slows doen in the middle of browsing and ultimately FIREFOX SUCKS!!!

Any Comments are Welcome Regards

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Backup your bookmarks, make a note of your favorite add-ons! Try doing a clean uninstall (deleting everything). Then install the latest version, you'd be surprized how fast it is :)

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A possible cause is security software (firewall) that blocks or restricts Firefox or the plugin-container process without informing you, possibly after detecting changes (update) to the Firefox program.

Remove all rules for Firefox from the permissions list in the firewall and let your firewall ask again for permission to get full unrestricted access to internet for Firefox and the plugin-container process and the updater process.

See:


Create a new profile as a test to check if your current profile is causing the problems.

See "Basic Troubleshooting: Make a new profile":

There may be extensions and plugins installed by default in a new profile, so check that in "Tools > Add-ons > Extensions & Plugins" in case there are still problems.

If that new profile works then you can transfer some files from the old profile to that new profile, but be careful not to copy corrupted files.

See: