How to disable Plugin-Container.exe Process of Firefox

by Venkat on July 7, 2010

In Firefox 3.6.4 and above versions plugins like Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime and Silverlight are separately loaded in a process called Plugin-container.exe and helps Firefox .exe main process to stay open even though any one of plug-ins crashes.It annoys users sometimes when plug-in container .exe runs in the background and shows crashed warning dialog boxes of it when it crashes.We can disable plugin-container.exe easily here is how.

Plug-in crash protection is offered to make Firefox more stable and to reduce less crashes so it is not recommended to disable plug-in container.exe process.If plugin-container.exe annoys by showing frequent crashes of it you can disable plug-in container.exe .

Disabling plugin-container.exe in Firefox

1.Open Firefox and type about:config and click I’ll be careful , I promise

2.Now search for ipc in Filter box .

3.Double click on each of five entries to set their values to false as shown above.

dom.ipc.plugins.enabled
dom.ipc.plugins.enabled.npctrl.dll
dom.ipc.plugins.enabled.npqtplugin.dll
dom.ipc.plugins.enabled.npswf32.dll
dom.ipc.plugins.enabled.nptest.dll

4.Restart Firefox browser.That’s it plugin–container is completely disabled for Firefox browser.

Tagged as: crash protection, crash protection in Firefox, disable plugin-container.exe, Firefox, plugin-container, plugin-container.exe, plugin-container.exe disable

{ 22 comments }

Meena July 7, 2010 at 3:21 pm: Nice to know how to disable it.But personally, i like when i can continue browsing even if one of the plugins crash
Venkat July 7, 2010 at 3:53 pm: @Meena
Everyone wants uninterrupted browsing even though plugins crahses but if your plugin-cointianer keep crashing then the above method will be useful for temporary period.
tori July 13, 2010 at 6:44 pm: works atlast now i can actuly load a page with a advert on it without having to reboot my pc ^_^
Strac July 17, 2010 at 12:43 am: dom.ipc.plugins.enabled should be set to true or false to disable Plugin-Container.exe?

the other 4 should be set to false, but the first?
Venkat July 17, 2010 at 11:28 am: @starc
I said all the 5 entries should be toggle to other one ,yes including the first one need to set to flase yes that’s the main one
Strac July 18, 2010 at 2:20 am: Well when I came to that options the first entrie was already set to false so I set it to true. Maybe I changed that entrie via some tools options in firefox before, thats why I asked.

I think it would be better to just say: set all 5 values to: FALSE instead of toggle them so then there wouldn’t be mistake?

thank you for your reply
Strac July 18, 2010 at 2:27 am: P.S. in the picture with 5 entries you can see that the 1st entrie is already set to false by default:

dom.ipc.plugins.enabled … default … bolean … false … ?
Jason Saggers July 21, 2010 at 11:09 am: This doesn’t do a thing here, firefox seems to get worse with every release.
Can blow 1.5gb of system ram when left for a few hours with only a few plugins / extensions etc installed.
It is like itunes I guess, that program with a large library installed also uses like 1.5gb of system ram.
The problem on some systems is that the plugin-container.exe process can use a constant 80% of the cpu which brings the browser and general computer usage to a crawl.
Venkat July 21, 2010 at 1:01 pm: So you think this post does not help in disabling plugin-container? u r saying Plugin-contianer is resource hog so this doesn’ help you in disabling that thing. To be frank Firefox 3.6.7 is not that much resource hog when compared to its previous versions.
wrx7m October 3, 2010 at 6:34 am: Oh thank god! For some reason, my plugin-container.exe was locking up the gui of my firefox every time I tried to play a flash video. No matter what site I tried it would lock up and I would have to end process on the plugin-container.exe process.

I tried disabling all my add-ons and it didn’t do anything. I also complete uninstalled firefox and all my profiles and it still didn’t do anything.

This worked! plugin-container.exe is the worst thing they have done to firefox.
Kochab October 27, 2010 at 10:27 am: I’ve had to resort to disabling this due to this process routinely locking up my system. What’s truly bizarre is the process priority in Task Manager was always set to AboveNormal and couldn’t be changed.
Jack October 29, 2010 at 12:33 am: So glad I found this explanation. It helped me so much. Firefox has been terrible since the update that installed this plug-in container.

Thanks!
Rob December 2, 2010 at 6:11 pm: I don’t whats going on with Firefox but windows explorer can’t display any directory listings on my hard drive unless I kill plugin-container with task manager. Firefox is becoming as bad as Internet Explorer.
Ghis February 22, 2011 at 6:45 am: thx,
I’m glad you found this. Plugin-conshit has never done anything about keeping firefox from crashing. Never. The only thing it did was to render firefox less and less responsive, letting me believe it was because of addon clotterings, until I couldn’t bare this and went on trying every memory auto-dumper I could find (for nothing that great).
This simple “about:config” has gave back firefox it speed, well it is at least 60% more responsive now that it was, and I still have my 30± addons running along, and also the 50± stylish styles and script blockers. I often close firefox with loads of tabs (25 and +), now it reopens-in with and all in about 7sec instead of the 35sec I was “getting” used to.

Other browser? No other browser is enabling me to do what firefox got me use to; download any video from anywhere, blocking ads and scripts and flash, styling, posting anything and everything or simply saving, etc… you name it, it does it.
I can’t settle for “something” call Chrome, IE9, Safari, or even Opera (while Opera being the best option down the road if mozilla comes to fail)

I need a browser, a solid tool. Not just some toy-tool messenging or posting window.
Firefox does the job, but I also making everything to keep it that way;)

Peace
Frank June 25, 2011 at 4:32 am: You have really helped me. When my Firefox decided to update it self from 3.6.17 to 3.6.18 out of no where came plugin-container. Since then when i tried to watch a video. My PC would grind to a halt. I’m running a Pentium 4 with only 500MB of ram.

Thanks again for showing me how to regain control of my video watching. )
Lynne July 18, 2011 at 7:44 pm: I don’t have any of the entries listed above that I am supposed to change. I have 4 total and the two different ones are for Java and a process launch timeout secs. Where are the rest? This is eating up over 500,000 of my memory and everything is constantly freezing up. Please help!
Zaizai August 15, 2011 at 2:06 am: I have FF 5.0.1 and plugin-container will kill me! Long time it eats my virtual memory, but now i have plugin-container crush on every page! I hate it. I can’t user FF anymore, it’s not serious.
omg such a f'ing stupid "feature" August 15, 2011 at 4:10 am: what a bunch of crap “plugin_container” is! Firefox developers should never have introduced this worthless piece of crap. All it does is continually crash everywhere ALL THE TIME. besides it is one more thing running on your computer that you don’t need. It massively slows down everything, and besides why would I want another thing running through my firewall? THANKFULLY you can disable it. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE DO NOT MAKE FIREFOX HAVE TO RUN PLUGIN_CONTAINER WITH NO WAY TO TURN IT OFF! (for future reference)
Jessica August 31, 2011 at 5:47 pm: Thank you so, so much for this post. I could not understand why my brand-new computer was suddenly running so slowly with just a browser open! Finally I looked at task manager and saw this stupid process gobbling my CPU. 230,000? WHY? So now that’s gone and it’s running like a brand-new computer again.
nord October 1, 2011 at 8:07 pm: Thanks much for the post…. on my old Pentium M, plugin container was consuming way too many resources (768 RAM) and so this works perfectly. Only thing I can imagine any better would be to have an extension that allows you to toggle these five settings.

Much appreciated.
GG November 2, 2011 at 6:15 am: Let’s face it. Freezefox is a massive drain on resources. You only have to look at your processes to see its huge footprint. The “only” reason Freezefox may be popular is entirely because of its dependence on add-ons. Take away the add-ons, and Freezefox is finished as a browser. And, despite the obvious evidence, they still insist that the cursed plug-in container is not a memory hog. Even a Google search will bring up the many problems people have with the dreaded plug-in container, But, of course, according to Mozilla everyone else is wrong.

The general problem with Mozilla Freezefox is it’s delusions of grandeur and overwhelming arrogance.
moob November 20, 2011 at 4:07 am: the only thing disabling this container does is that it releases RAM, it does absolutely nothing for CPU usage:

website: youtube

with it enabled:
FF: 16% CPU / 66Mb RAM
plugin-container.exe: 79% CPU / 35Mb RAM

disabled:
FF: 75% CPU / 160+MB RAM

when you disable the process all you are doing is shifting the CPU load back to the FF process. conclusion is if your system is slow and hangs with the plugin enabled, it will still be slow and hang disabled.

the last stable system friendly version of FF i used was way back around 3.0.6, it’s been dire ever since