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How to Stop “plugin-container.exe” Process in Firefox 3.6.x?

Firefox 3.6.6 making browsing slow on your computer? If yes, it may be due to plugin-container.exe, which was added in recent version of Firefox to prevent browser crash. New version of Firefox web browser loads certain plugins in a separate process 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.

You may experience the problem more often while viewing online flash videos. So, want to disable or stop plugin-container.exe in Firefox 3.6.6? Follow these simple steps:


Steps to stop plugin-container.exe process:

  • 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 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).
    Toggle (double-click) each of the four remaining preferences to change the value from “true” to “false“.
  • That’s it. For help, take a look at the screenshot.

Explanation:
The crash protection feature in Firefox 3.6 is enabled for certain plugins only. The four preferences that we modified here specifies four different out-of-process plugins. They are the the NPAPI test plugin, Adobe Flash, Apple QuickTime (Windows) and Microsoft Silverlight (Windows). These plugins are specified in a separate dom.ipc.plugins.enabled.<filename> preference by default is set to true. We can disable them by changing their value to false. And thus plugin-container.exe will not run. By default the 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.

What is plugin-container.exe?
Firefox 3.6.4 or above versions provides uninterrupted browsing for Windows and Linux users even when there is a crash in the Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime or Microsoft Silverlight plugins. The crash protection in Firefox is provided by loading some plugins separately in a new process called plugin-container. So, that’s your plugin-container.exe.

<< If you are using Firefox 4 please refer this post: Stop Plugin-container in Firefox 4 >>

 

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