Some problems:

- I previously posted here under the name "leob". Suddenly those post are gone (but some replies are still left). What happened?

- I still can not use FF. I have tried everything here, but FF is terribly slow for many sites (like parts of PubMed, for example the help pages there).

I am using Zotero though so I try to open a FF instance for just that when I need too.

At the moment I am using Google Chrome instead which is very fast for me. (I have said this before, but I hope that is not the reason my comments where erased here. Please tell me that it is not so!)

That is not so. Apparently, some (quite a few actually) posts and threads got deleted on the update to the forums... I doubt those deletions were manually done.

Anyway, if you tried everything, what happened when you ran safe mode without add-ons? And what happened when you tried a new profile?

Only threads from the last three months were converted to the new forum format.
At the moment the non-imported threads have not been removed and the old forum search should still find then and allow to access them.

https://support.mozilla.com/tiki-searchindex.php?where=forums&advancedfsearch=y&forumId=1&author=&words=

Old threads can only be accessed via the old php functions:
https://support.mozilla.com/tiki-view_forum_thread.php?forumId=1&comments_parentId=

If plugin-container.exe uses a lot of cpu and memory you can end the process in the task manager. After this any plugin on the webpages will close and have to be reloaded. If this happens often you should find out which page misbehaves and report it.

I think this might be a problem with the code of the plugin-container.exe. What I think is that when you close FF normally, it doesn't shutdown the plugin container process so you're FF and p-c.exe are allowed to continue to run. Every time I have close FF normally I have had to go into my task manager and kill the FF/p-c.exe processes in order to open a new window.

sunveer3................I have followed your instructions. However, the dom.ipc plug-ins enables is already set to False, yet Plug-in container. exe is still using 98% of my CPU and slowing down my PC. Any other fixes that you know of?

what is this crap with plugin container? I messes up on every one of my computers. How long has this been going on already? This is 2010. Fix it. Now! Unbelievable.

Used to love Firefox...now it's like damn IE.

Great, thank's. Setting "dom.ipc.plugins.enabled.*" to FALSE totally helped me!

Great work! Bjorgvin

First time I've felt the need to post but, plugin container is a disaster. Disabling it per instructions has solved my startup/browsing problems. Tried all the other "fixes" safe mode etc. unsucessfully. Now load time <20secs, prev 2 mins.

I guess I'm approaching my question from a different angle. I'm using an older computer and when I open windows task manager and look at the processes, at times it is taking up more resources that Firefox itself. It makes the video feed from Hulu jerk and skip. My question is simply, What is the worst that would happen if I turned plug-in container off completely? would I still be able to run my Hulu in full screen?

i have this huge problem with this container, if you play flash based games like cityville on facebook the plugin container wil grab up to around 400mb of available memory. With my machine only having 512mb in total, this causes so much disk swapping the systems slows to a point where by the running processes become unresponsive.

I know i should just buy more memory but the whole point of not using IE and using firefox is i thought it was a fast browser.

I hope firefox does not get blamed for something a plug in is doing. Surely there is a programming team out there that can fix flash so it is more resources efficient.

My firefox was made slower by this too, though I never received a notification and in fact I was on a page where all flash was blocked. Maybe the plugin container got confused by NoScript somehow? No idea. I only figured out what was causing it by searching for stuff out of Task manager processes.

Anyway, I've followed Alice Wyman's advice on the about:config page. But can anyone tell me whether this will still make Firefox slower overall, even if it doesn't crash? Is so, I will downgrade.

Also, I know there is now a new version of Firefox (Firefox 4) but I'm not interested. Will there still be updates to 3, that will hopefully fix the plugin container problem? Thanks.

Fixes have landed with Firefox 4 to fix some of the problems with out of process plugins.

Firefox 3.6 will soon be discontinued, so you should either update your Firefox when it does get discontinued, or you should use some other browse that IS supported, if you don't want to keep using Firefox. Updates for Firefox 3.6 are planned, but only for security fixes, and they too will stop when Firefox 3.6 gets discontinued.

i have Firefox 4 and i still have plugin-container problems!! the darn thing keeps eating up memory like crazy. before i could have a hundred tabs open at once and have no problem at all but now you are lucky if you can have half that open without firefox crashing. right now i have 10 tabs open and the plugin-container is using 152828k of memory that's almost half of what firefox is using. this exe is getting out of hand and really needs to be fixed guys

Even with the latest version of Firefox 4 Plugin-Container.exe takes over my laptop.

The fan is going constantly, causing the cpu to run slowly, and I only have 20 tabs open.

It really is frustrating, FF used to be the best browser until Plugin-Container.exe was introduced. I still prefer it to Chrome and refuse to use MSIE8, but the slowness and crashing are really frustrating.

Official Old Version Release http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-older.html

Firefox 3.6 also has the plugin container. Any problems you may be experiencing with plugins such as Flash are probably because of some problems with the plugin. Make sure it's up to date and contact its developer for support.

NOTE THERE IS A KNOWN BUG AFFECTING THE PLUGIN CONTAINER

The bug will cause multiple copies of the plugincontainer.exe to open when data/cookies are cleared, this may happen even if the plugins are disabled.

If you are specifically unexpectedly seeing multiple copies of plugin container and think that is the problem you could start a thread about that. This current thread is already 5 pages long and rather unwieldy.

( Please do not post unnecessarily in bugzilla unless you are adding specific brand new information, but of course feel free to vote for a bug or add yourself to the email listing for it, the etiquette page is : https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html and it is bug 633427
BUT remember if you look for this problem you will find it exists, that does not necessarily mean that bug is causing your own individual problems. )

Ahh... this problem just showed up out of nowhere, all of a sudden Firefox is like a turtle- moves along super slow, when you try to do too many things it gets freaked out and just stops working altogether (in turtle's case, goes into shell, in Firefox's case, just crashes the hell out of my computer). I noticed this plugin-container.exe process in Task Manager which just appeared out of nothingness, when I killed it, Firefox went down with it so I put 2 & 2 together... after browsing through some posts about it potentially being malware, running Malwarebytes and coming up clean, I finally found this. O YAY is me, it works! Firefoxturtle is no more, now it's just Firefox again. Many thanks for the fix.

~Voltz

Hi friends

I notice the same problem on my pc:

Windows 7 Ultimate Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB Firefox v3.6.13

I run a trading platform 24/7 on my laptop & start noticing a problem on my pc's Number 1 core which seems to be using 99% of its resources after I upgraded a couple of Firefox add-ons. It made my browsing a headache..

I had the 4, dom.ipc option changed to false but it was still happening.

SO THIS IS THE STEP which helped put everything back to normal.

I upgraded 3 (three FF add-on)

1. AdBlock Plus to v1.3.8
2. DownThemAll to v2.0.7
3. Flashgot to v1.3.0.2

So i downgraded them back to previous version

1. AdBlock Plus 1.3.7
2. DTA v2.o.6
3. Flashgot v1.3.0.2rc8

After a FF restart, everything went back to normal and no more swearing over my bug ridden FF.

I loooooove Firefox!

Hope this helps... aL