Firefox Plugin Container

[Bigaldoc]

One of my son's friends recommended this procedure when my son told him Firefox runs very slowly on his computer.

I don't know enough about the "technicals" to understand if this plugin container disabling "hurts" the operation of Firefox in some unseen way.

My son's computer is a five year old Dell Pentium 4 2.8 GHZ processor with "only" 512 gig memory, running XP.

Can someone advise on this procedure, please: Stop Plugin-Container in Firefox 4

(His computer is way beyond Fx 4 but I don't know if he's got Fx 11 installed yet.)

[viking33]

One of my son's friends recommended this procedure when my son told him Firefox runs very slowly on his computer.

I don't know enough about the "technicals" to understand if this plugin container disabling "hurts" the operation of Firefox in some unseen way.

My son's computer is a five year old Dell Pentium 4 2.8 GHZ processor with "only" 512 gig memory, running XP.

Can someone advise on this procedure, please: Stop Plugin-Container in Firefox 4

(His computer is way beyond Fx 4 but I don't know if he's got Fx 11 installed yet.)

It would be interesting to find out if this works OR has been corrected in the later Fx versions, like 11.x.

[Bigaldoc]

The only thing I know is that my son evidently followed the "procedure" and he says that his Fx is running somewhat faster, so it didn't crash him, but ...

That's why I wondered if it disables something that he won't even be aware of until some future time.

[Bigaldoc]

I just did about:config on my version 11 and searched for these DLLs, pointed out in the hack and here's what I see.

npctrl.dll = Silverlight Plugin
npqtplugin.dll = QuickTime Plugin
npswf32.dll = Shockwave Flash (except mine has a version number too)
nptest.dll = (not found in my installation)

[Bigaldoc]

It would be interesting to find out if this works OR has been corrected in the later Fx versions, like 11.x.

I've been Googling and looking through the Mozillazine forum and can't find anything that talks specifically about plugin-container.exe in the more recent versions of Firefox.

I did open Task Manager and "watched" that program for a long time and it occupies NO CPU "unless" you view videos of one kind or another. Just as a test, I opened up the replay video on the web of the championship basketball game. When I did, the .exe jumped up in the range of 25-35% CPU but (in my opinion) one would expect something like that. I'm NOT gonna kill it to see if I CANNOT view video, but maybe I should try that too.

Truth is, I don't understand why my son thinks his Fx is better with that plugin stuff disabled. I would think he'd be hamstrung when on ANY site that has video of any kind, and he's a frequent visitor to ESPN and lots of others. I won't get to test my theory until Saturday when I visit him.

[Argus]

Seems like an old hack from the time when Mozilla introduced the Plugin-Container. At the time there where many people that wanted to get rid of the process if for no other reasons than they didn't want more things running, no matter if it helped avoiding a browser crash, but many also had problems with slow running browsers as usual, it seems.

Also mentioned in for example this MozillaZine KB article, as a troubleshooting measure.
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Plugin-contai ... ss_plugins" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I would think he'd be hamstrung when on ANY site that has video of any kind ...

I haven't looked closer at this, but you are not disabling, for example, flash player video content, you're disabling the browser crash protection, moving them back to running with the browser.

As you say, the Plugin-Container process starts as soon as one visits a site using some of the plugins.

With a recent version of Fx, I would rather look at how many installed add-ons there are, which add-ons etc. Though it's quite some time since I ran a XP system with 512 MB RAM (or 256 MB), so I don't know how a recent browser would run on low system specs. As you know, it's easy to check Fx in Safe Mode via the Help menu.

And there is also this general help page, Firefox is slow.