Have you ever noticed something called plugin-container.exe running on your computer and you didn’t know where exactly it came from? Well, I can ease your mind some because this is from Firefox. Ever since Firefox 3.6.4 this extra process has been in there helping protect your browsing just in case Firefox decides to crash.
For Windows and Linux users, Firefox 3.6.4 provides what they called "uninterrupted browsing". So, what does this mean? Firefox loads certain plugins (like Adobe Flash, Quicktime, and Silverlight) in a separate process to provide you uninterrupted browsing even when certain plugins stops working.
How can I disable plugin-container.exe?
I would not recommend disabling this feature because it is there for a pretty good purpose. However, some people have had issues with it using a fair share of memory. So for those who want to stop plugin-container.exe – here are the steps to do so:
- In the Firefox address bar, type in about:config
- In the filter box, type in dom.ipc
- Ignore 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
So to translate of of the technical jargon here – this is a feature of Firefox and will do you no harm. It is not malware or something else that is nasty and causing problems for your PC either. It is mainly there just to keep plugins like Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime and Microsoft Silverlight from crashing the browser.
Thanks Mitch,
I’ve seen this before and it’s crashed, from time to time.
But, FF seems to run well these days.
Perhaps, when something new like this
is added to FF, one of your contributors
can bring us up to date as quickly as they notice it.
Bob
Thank you for posting this. Found it the other day and had no clue what it was for.