Thanks rjohnson!

I must say this is the poorest release of FireFox I have ever seen and if this CRAP is not fixed by the next release I will be removing FF from Home as well as recommend to my CIO that it be removed from all work PC's as well. VERY POOR showing FireFox!

I just hope the above workaround is enough to fix my issues until this gets fixed/removed from Firefox

I had same problem after same update. Any site with any plug in (from children's reading games to facebook games). I installed the beta tonight, and had same problems only worse. I can't even get to the screen on it to report the problem as they have asked beta users to do! Never a problem before. I use to tell everyone how great FF is...not sure if I will keep saying that though. It seems a lot of us have the same problem and FF is pointing fingers at someone else. I wish they would acknowledge and let us know they are working on it.

I have a similar problem with 3.6.6 on Intel Mac running 3.5.8 OS. When I launch Firefox - the window is totally unresponsive - can't mouse over, click, select or type any commands. Can quit the program and restart and usually have to do this 3-6 times to get a "functioning" window running. When window is non-functioning, program will sometimes respond to commands from the menu bar, but not always and not all commands (except quit - which always works.)

Follow up to my previous post - just wanted to note that I have disabled the container as had been previously recommended and it made no noticeable difference. Program still requires multiple starts/restarts in order to get a responsive and usable program window. I run very few add-ons and extensions, but have not tried disabling them all, yet.

Scott:

Then investigate other causes. Viruses (yes Macs get viruses too), other programs running in background, some add-ons causing problems (try FF Safe Mode).

Wow, my browser had been crashing SO much since a recent update, slow performance and huge memory usage too. I happend to come across plugincontainer.exe and investigated....

Turns out a HUGE amount of people are having the exact same problems as me, and you can bet money that another huge amount dont even realise their system is crapping up because of this container. Really poor container, its almost like its running about 600 virtual layers (e.g cheap "I cant be bothered to do it properly" security).

I wouldnt recomend trying to fix this container guys, just remove it and bring the stability back!

I had the same problem; Firefox 3.6 hanging and using heaps of memory.

Following research here applied the fix shown below and it seems to have fixed the problem, certainly memory use.

Vista - Firefox 3.6.6 and previous.

rjohnson19 459 posts

Because 3.6.4 had some security fixes, and you won't want to skip further fixes, there is a better option.

You'll want to disable all Crash Protection as follows:

   * In the Location bar, type about:config and press Enter.
   * The about:config "This might void your warranty!" warning page may appear.
   * Click I'll be careful, I promise!, to continue to the about:config page.
   * Type dom.ipc.plugins into the Filter textbox.
   * Double click or right click and choose Toggle on ALL true/false options (other than dom.ipc.plugins.timeoutSecs) so that they are set to false.
   * You might need to restart for changes to take effect. 

plugin-container.exe shouldn't be used anymore with this change.

If you do have this problem, it would be appreciated if you could post your Flash version (if the problem is triggered by Flash), AV software, and what sites(s) trigger the high CPU usage.

F-SECURE but is was unloaded so disable Firefox 3.6.6. Vista x64 sp2 and W7 home edition 64 Well updated pcs and clean. Java 6.20 Silverlight 4 (4.0.50524.0) SHock Wave 10.1.53.54 Flash

it was a www, financial application call Silver (That one use flash as well as Silverlight) and a Java applet. QuotestreamPRO.

Each time I start it, the process went 80-100% , difficult to click, right click slow, finaly performance of the browser and others apps like freestockcharts.com are very slow.

rjohnson19 - thank you for the disable guide, at least I can stay with firefox now.

While I grasp the concept of trying to isolate these plug-in processes from the browser and believe it is a reasonable idea the excecution is lack-lustre. It would at least be nice to have a quick link to disable the plugin-container instead of having to follow extra steps just to get to a workable browser. I do not see this having much support in it's current incarnation and if it becomes a standard of firefox I am afraid that will be the day I place it in the grave.

I am currently using 3.6.6 and hulu locks up on me like crazy. gonna try this about:config thing now.

I just got this performance issues as well where Firefox took 25% of my CPU (having 4 cores its all the resources of one core). For me disabling plugin-container did not work but disabling FlashBlock 1.5.13 (latest version) solved my problem. I've installed Flash Killer instead and the CPU utilization of Firefox is jumping beteen 0-4%.

Add one more vote to the "get rid of the plug-in container" campaign. I had absolutely NO problems whatsoever before this latest update, and now that I've disabled the plug-in container, I once again have no problems. RAM utilization is back to normal, or at least normal for Firefox (i.e. a bit excessive, but tolerable), and CPU usage is practically nil. When enabled, the plug-in container regularly used nearly a gig of RAM - and this is over and above the 300 - 400 megs Firefox itself normally uses the way I have it configured - and pushed both CPU cores to a near constant 75 - 80%. This is simply not good work, guys.

Mozilla developers, please stop trying to lay the blame for this apparently quite common problem everywhere except where it belongs and listen to what people are telling you. The problem isn't with Flash, some other faulty plug-in or anything else. The problem is with YOUR buggy "fix" for something that really didn't need fixing. I've never had a plug-in crash at all, let alone crash and take my browser with it, but if enough people really have had problems with crashing plug-ins to warrant a fix, couldn't you at least have made sure the fix worked reliably before incorporating it into an update? "Fixes" that break more than they fix is something I'd expect from a company like EA Games, not from you guys.

Now, if you'd just get around to finally fixing that damned memory leak....

rjohnson19, thank you for your advice to disable all Crash Protection. I followed your advice.

At the moment I have version 3.6.6. but I had this plugin-container.exe crash problem even with the previous version. High CPU usage and crashing happened when using normal web pages like www.iltalehti.fi, www.hs.fi, www.iltasanomat.fi, ... and even http://support.mozilla.com/fi/kb/Mik%C3%A4+on+plugin-container

I hope crashing will stop now.

Three ideas that may help:

Option 1: Upgrade to FF 4.0 beta 1.

Option 2: Downgrade to FF 3.6.3.

Option 3: Download and install 4.0 beta, but don't run it. Just copy the file plugin-container.exe from the beta directory to the 3.6.x directory. Then go into about:config and set all the "dom.ipc" entries to True.

Problem seems worse on http://slashdot.org/ and http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ (high CPU usage, CPU fan starts running).

The instructions to disable plugin-container worked.

I tried reducing the priority of plugin-container, but it just causes the browser to become unresponsive.

Flash version is:

   File: NPSWF32.dll
   Version: 10.0.32.18
   Shockwave Flash 10.0 r32

After "upgrading" from 3.6.3 to 3.6.4 Firefox and Flash became clunky and slow. It was impossible to play Flash videos, they would severely lag and show one frame every 4 or 5 seconds. I have never had a problem with Flash crashing in the past so this change of isolating the plug-in was of zero benefit to me. I was ready to get rid of Firefox completely but decided to try and reinstall 3.6.3. Since doing this Flash works fine again, videos play normally and at the proper frame rate.

I won't upgrade again until the plugin-container resource problem has been fixed.

I was having the same problem with CPU and memory just hammered and my poor little notebook fan has been working its heart out. I tried the "rjohnson19 fix" and gotta say that has cleared everything up. So I am still running 3.6.4 but dont have issue anymore. I did restart FF after I made changes and it did say it was 'updating' so I just let it do its thing. After that the FF success HTML suggested I DL the latest Version of Adobe Flash but I ignored it. Adobe flash latest is in my humble opinion a heap of garbage and I hate the new update constantly bugging you and hanging around in the background. Still ... thats adobes problem but FF should not rely on everyone suckling at Adobe's breast. Some people just don't like their latest flavor. Me included.

rjohnson19: "Because 3.6.4 had some security fixes, and you won't want to skip further fixes, there is a better option.

You'll want to disable all Crash Protection as follows:"

Thank you rjohnson19!! It worked like a charm.

I have Shockwave Flash 10.1.53.64

I had the same problem, and the best solution is to roll back to Firefox 3.6.3. the 'plugin-container.exe' feature should be optional add-on not part of the update.