I’ve recently noticed that when viewing pages with Flash content in Firefox 4 (such as YouTube or any page with a Flash advert) that my PC slows to a crawl. The Windows Task Manager shows that the culprit is plugin-container.exe. The idea behind plugin-container.exe is that Firefox runs all plugins in a separate container – so that if the plugin crashes, the browser itself doesn’t crash but stays open. In theory it is a good idea but it makes my PC unusable so the only way to go is to disable it.
Thankfully it’s not too difficult to disable – type about:config into the address bar, and search for ‘dom.ipc’.Then change the value for ‘dom.ipc.plugins.enabled’ from true to false (just double clicking on it should change the value).
Once this is done, restart Firefox and it will no longer use plugin-container. Now web pages featuring Flash no longer slow down my PC quite as badly!
I see a lot of direction in defeating Plugin-Container.exe but no discussion in what happens after I do.
Here is my problem:
The on-line class is using Adobe Connect. Last night was the first session. During the class, I found that chat typing was excruciatingly slow. If I were to enter in these three lines, it would have taken about 3 minutes just to show on the screen.
When I checked the task manager, it showed that Plugin-Container.exe was eating up 98% of the CPU time. Here is the interesting part: At times, the instructor’s system would crash and the CPU time went to almost 0. We, as students could still communicate with each other both in voice and chat. This meant that we were still linked to Connect on the school server but when the instructor was connected my system practically stopped.
I have another class on Tuesday, July 20 and would like to get this going.
My system is using Firefox 5.0 and Adobe Reader X is the 10.1 version.
If you disable plugin-container, the Flash content will run in a Firefox process instead, so you’ll see a Firefox process in Task Manager rather than plugin-container. So your on-line class should still work, you may still get high CPU usage but hopefully not as bad as it is with plugin-container.
Thanks for your comment!