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Plugin-container.exe makes browsing slow: how 2 solve?

  • 119 cavab
  • 10818 have this problem
  • 1 view
  • Last reply by hotled

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I have reverted to 3.5 because the latest versions of FF include some nonsense called plugin-container. FF was brilliant prior to the plugin-container but now it is noticeably slower.

Are there any early versions of 3.6 without the plugin-container available for download.

Can someone fix the plugin-container nonsense. FF was perfect prior to the plugin-container

URL of affected sites

http://

I have reverted to 3.5 because the latest versions of FF include some nonsense called plugin-container. FF was brilliant prior to the plugin-container but now it is noticeably slower. Are there any early versions of 3.6 without the plugin-container available for download. Can someone fix the plugin-container nonsense. FF was perfect prior to the plugin-container == URL of affected sites == http://

Modified by NoahSUMO

All Replies (19)

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VOLZ: you comment:, "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." but I cannot figure out what you found...

What did you find?

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I think Firefox should rethink this this plugin container, I run a CPU/RAM usage monitor and the CPU is running at 80 - 90% and that is too much on my laptop. When I am outside, temperature is in the high 90s Fahrenheit and the high CPU usage creates a lot of heat. I've been using Firefox for a very long time but unfortunately I now have to put it aside because my laptop is more important than my browser. This post is being written using Google Chrome and my CPU is <15%, with 3 tabs open.

Over the years, I put a lot of effort getting Firefox the way I wanted it and will continue to use it on my desktop computers but I dropped it from my laptop.

What are these guys thinking? I am a loyal Firefox user but now I can see a lot of great things about Chrome - there are hundreds of great extensions, easy to download and they can be installed without restart....Google is creeping up on Firefox for total users and this latest "error fix" may push them over the top.

If anybody from Mozilla reads this, please consider giving us the option to roll back the version for our Firefox. I may keep using Chrome, downloaded and installed 30 extensions in under 15 minutes, without having to restart. Google Chrome 12 has 1% higher market share than Firefox 5 http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?spider=1&qprid=2 and you seem bent on increasing the share for Google, with this awful "improvement". Let the plugin crash and let us reload.

This "fix" is a lot of overkill - find the reason why plugins crash and fix it. Don't fix it by driving my CPU usage into the RED zone on my laptop.

Here's an idea: Release a new version, with DEFAULT as disabled and then "non techies" won't have to use about:config - especially with the warning they will see when they open it!!!. If those users have problems - recommend them to enable the feature.

Modified by radars

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Hey! You want Mozilla to do something about plug-in container? Till now it was only plug-ins that were run outside Firefox, now Mozilla is thinking of creating more and more separate processes not only for plug-ins this time but for many more things of Firefox.

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Responses are a year old on this???? Still not fixed? To anyone who has access to Firefox source code - the "about:config", "dom.ipc" thing works fine. The observable memory leak in Task manager is that the memory usage starts around 50k, then creeps up to around 200k, about 1k per second, then the 200k pops back down to around 50k, starting over again, on my PC. My PC has XP service pack 3.

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Things have moved on a bit since this thread started. if you have aspecific problem it is probably better to start your own question and thread. We now have Firefox 8 on the Aurora channel and that moves to the beta channel in a few days time.

Changes have been made, and bugs fixed.

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Firefox 7 was working fine and then one day I ran into the problem of container.exe dragging down and hanging Firefox with the Windows "caused a problem and had to close" dialog popping up every time it tried to load a page. After clicking out of the dialog Firefox completed loading the page. After disabling all plugins and then enabling them one by one I found that Shockwave 11.0 was the culprit.

I tried going down to Flash 9.0 without resolution. I went back to Flash 10.2, disabled container.exe by typing in the browser window about:config and changing the line dom.ipc.plugins.enabled to false by clicking on the line. It became more stable but when a problem was encountered it would crash FF instead of the container. I disabled hardware acceleration in Flash and it appears to be OK.

Modified by wallstreetobserver

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Shockwave is the standard FlashPlayer plugin. Flash Player does by default on current versions of Firefox use plugin container.

Flashplayer will I imagine have a userbase in Millions on Firefox. If a new release of flashplayer itself causes problems on Firefox I would expect it to be reported quickly and widely.

If problems are noticed it may be worth checking the FlashPlayer version is up-to-date, and also that video drivers are up-to-date, and consider checking settings such as FlashPlayers settings for hardware acceleration.

Also note there is a known bug that causes multiple instances of plugin container to run when cookies or History are cleared in Firefox. As I mentioned in a post above this is now an old thread. Any questions would be better asked in a new thread.

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This thing is so ridiculous. It's taking like 51-59CPU to run not including the 10-25 FF.exe needs to run. And when I use FF while using BitComet my laptop makes this horrible sound. With all the other minor apps that's taking up 1-2 CPU it's making my CPU fluctuate from 80-100!! I have to resort to stupid Chrome because of this and I HATE it.

My computer worked fine w/o out before. FF RARELY crashed which is why I prefer it to IE and Chrome (which sucks w/ privacy protection) but FF is soooooooooooooo slow now.

If I delete the current version and DL and older version will the plugin-container.exe still be there?! If so can anyone give me the link to the older version? This is why I should never every click update on something that was working flawlessly.

Modified by White_Meteor

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If you delete your current install and install Firefox again, it won't make any difference whatsoever. At least it won't if your problem isn't related to the installed files, which it probably isn't. You can try to reinstall Firefox, though. It won't hurt. At worst you're wasting your time.

Trying out a new profile [ http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Profiles ] may yeld some results, however. See this:

https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/questions/713600?page=4#answer-27146

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I might have discovered the solution without starting over with all your places and bookmarks.

Right after i installed 7.0.1 over a week ago,every 10-30 min When i would be watching videos online, it would freeze for 20-30 seconds. Firefox would say ( Not responding) both firefox and the plugin container process would be very large memory files. I tried to go back to Firefox 5.0. No avail it would still freeze.I tried to disable the plugin container . no good. I tried to adjust memory or cache or plugin settings in “about:config”.Nothing fixed it!

I finally discovered why my Firefox 7.01 was periodic hanging fix. It is something to do with some of your personal files. download this this add on and install it https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/places-maintenance/

or you can Google "places maintenance Firefox"

After you install the add on, restart Firefox.go to "tools", then "add ons" and then click “extensions” tab ,then click' options" on the "places maintenance" entry. choose "ALL' or just "expire" and hit "execute", then wait until its done., restart Firefox. should be fine then and all my bookmarks, customizations ,settings, and history stays untouched!

After i did this my Firefox did not freeze once for over 3 days straight. Might not work for everyone. I already read thaqt Mozilla is aware of the problem and are working on a fix it in the full version of 8( the 8 beta did not fix the problem for me) . But they said this is a good temporary fix at least,( might be permanent)

For me at least ,Firefox works fine in 7 now. perfect actually.And many people i saw on similar forums had similar problems.

Enjoy. Hope this helped

Modified by imajakov

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@imajakov I hope you are correct where ever you read that " they are aware of the problem " and " are working on a fix it in the full version of 8 ", because i think Firefox is great, and am testing out Chrome to see what it can do, and i am actually surprised. It has some nice themes, and does support some popular adons, however it is still lacking in areas that Firefox excels. I would hate to have to go the way of Chrome, which has zero support from Google, but if the FUll version of 8 does not resolve this issue i will be forced to.

Meanwhile I am running Version 4.01 with the latest version of FLASH and I have not had a single crash. THIS IS NOT AN ADOBE PROBLEM. Anyways here is a link to old versions if you want:

http://www.oldapps.com/firefox.php

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Use the lastest 3.6 instead. 4.1 is unpatched and insecure. Don't complain if your security is compromised.

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Long threads often meander and are likely to contain information pertaining to more than one problem and many different setups.

@imajakov I hope you are correct where ever you read that " they are aware of the problem " and " are working on a fix it in the full version of 8 "

hangs fixed
I think imajakov is referring to the hangs caused by the problems with a firefox database file that problem has now been studied and

old versions
It may be safer to use Firefox 3.6 than firefox 4. I mentioned that in Camic's thread /questions/888865#answer-264487

hangs blunder on Windows
A firefox change has resulted in problems on windows systems in some circumstances. Firefox testing including automated tests, then betas and full releases unfortunately failed to pick up this substantial problem. I think the boffins will be trying to improve automated testing oh hangs, meanwhile there is a manual workaround for this: https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Firefox%20never%20finishes%20loading%20certain%20websites#w_lower-the-max-number-of-http-connections and the developers are working on a solution and the reasons behind this (bug692260)

Multiple plugin containers
This is a known issue but possibly only a minor inconvenience. (detailed above {bug 633427})


P.S.
This is an old long thread, whilst I have tried to add some answers, it really would be a good idea to post any questions in your own new thread click here

Forum guidelines do suggest not reusing old threads

Create one thread and only one thread for each subject you want to discuss. For support requests, do not re-use existing threads started by others, even if they are seemingly on the same subject.

Modified by John99

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Thanks AliceWyman for that great tip. Disabling that dom.ipc.plugins straight away saved me 500 MB in FF 8.0.

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Running Linux 32 bit with Firefox 8.0 Shockwave Flash 10.1 r53 (and 11.1 r102) freezes Firefox for 45s when loading a page containing Flash, eg youtube.com. This makes Firefox effectively unusable. Solution follows... If dom.ipc.plugins.processLaunchTimeoutSecs is changed from 45 to 5 the delay is reduced to 5s, so it's related to this. If dom.ipc.plugins.enabled is changed from true to false the freeze no longer occurs. To access dom.ipc.plugins go to URL "about:config".

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The plugin-container.exe problem lies in the latest adobe flash player plugin for mozilla firefox. Goto http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/142/tn_14266.html and download the uninstaller for the plugin. Then download a latter plugin (the released 9/21/2011) and install this. After this install firefox will ask you to install latest flash player plugin, but dont do this because then will you get the plugin-container.exe file. Godspeed.

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Then download a latter plugin (the released 9/21/2011)

I can't find this version to download. Can you?

Edit: I found them here http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/142/tn_14266.html. Hope this can help some other. It's functioning.

Modified by tinem

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i fix the problem temporarily by renaming the file located in firefox folder named plugin-container.exe. renamed to plugin-container.ex it quits working and keeps firefox working

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easy to fix just go here and watch the video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPbuxlfwvto

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