Firefox users with eagle eyes might have spotted a new process that pops up from time to time when they are running the web browser. The process plugin-container.exe appears and disappears sporadically depending on the websites visited.
Regular Ghacks readers might already know the answer. Mozilla has added so called out-of-process plugins to the Firefox web browser. This feature runs specific Firefox plugins, like Adobe’s Flash Player, Quicktime or Silverlight, in their own process whenever they are needed to run elements on a web page (see Firefox 3.6.4 release announcement for additional information).
The plugin-container.exe process is that extra process that is launched whenever one of the supported plugins is started in Firefox.
plugin-container.exe
The process remains active once it has been started. It is for instance triggered when the Firefox user starts to view a Flash or Quicktime video and closed when Firefox is closed or its manually killed.
Mozilla currently uses one plugin container for all supported browser plugins. This is unlike Google Chrome where every plugin is launched in its own process. Future Firefox versions will be modified so that the plugins are run in their own process as well.
Check out Run Custom Firefox Plugins In Their Own Process to find out how to run additional plugins in Plugin-Container.exe instead of the main Firefox process.
Update: Plugin-Container.exe currently supports the following three popular plugins:
- Adobe Flash
- Apple Quicktime
- Microsoft Silverlight
Support is tied to plugin crash reports that Mozilla receives from user systems who have opted in to submit those information automatically whenever a plugin on the system crashes. New plugins may be added to the Plugin Container process if their crash rate increases significantly.
Related Articles:
Why Are 2 Plugin-Container.Exe Processes Running?Run Custom Firefox Plugins In Their Own Process
Thunderbird And Firefox Plugin Checker
Mozilla Plugin Check Now Checks Plugins In All Web Browsers
Opera 64-bit, and Out-of-process Plugins Now Available For Testing
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Thing is a freakin memory pig. The browser takes like a 150Mb of ram, and then this plugin container is taking an equal amount.
Don’t know if anyone is reading this anymore – but plugin-container.exe doesn’t close when firefox closes on this computer. I saw it was still running when I looked in windows task manager/processes.
All well and good.
But does anyone know how to use this thing?
It seems…phhht
to provide a lot of necessary tunnels
to run 16bit apps.
After much frustration, (many browser and computer freezes) my opinion is that plugin-container.exe was an extreme booboo on mozilla’s part
I learned you can disable the firefox plugin-container.exe, so the plugins operate as they normally would without the plugin saboteur
type about:config in the addressbar (note, that there are no spaces in that) and search for ipc in the seachbox at the top of the about:config page.
Right click those top 5 entries and toggle them to the opposite of what they are now, i.e.
dom.ipc.plugins.enabled.npswf32.dll – true
becomes
dom.ipc.plugins.enabled.npswf32.dll – false
and so on
That will disable all the container startups
I did this about a month ago and have no more problems with videos and other plugins like seen on the weather channel.
At least you get the chance to disable it, other browsers do not give you that much customization (Chrome, use or leave)
jimc, thanks for useful answer.
jimc. thank you so much for helping me out of this memory loss nitemare.
I only see one ipc entry in about:config.
Time to revive this thread. I have FF 10.0.2. Several days ago plugin-container (I had never heard of the damned thing before) started eating CPU for no discernible reason. I went online and found instructions for disabling four particular files, but when I went to about:config they weren’t there. I disabled the main plugin-container file and it *still* hogged CPU. Checked my running processes, and there were two of them, one causing the problem. I terminated both and it went away.
Suspecting malware somewhere, I ran Spybot S&D and Malwarebytes full check. They found nothing.
So why can’t I stop it in about:config? And why did it start up all of sudden after maintaining an appropriately low profile for all these years?