Firefox is constantly freezing up, and I can't get it going again until I close pluginscontainer.exe which, when freezing, is quite large (sometimes even as big as 300MB). What is causing this? It seems to happen on pages with Flash.
I have already tried reinstalling Firefox, using both the BETA and Stable releases. I've cleared all of my plugins and started over with them, reinstalling Flash multiple times as well. After an uninstallation, I even went as far as deleting Mozilla from my Appdata folder on my user account and from Program Files to assure complete uninstallation. This crash happens multiple times in a day, I can't go 20 minutes of browsing without this happening.
Also, there are multiple instances of plugin-container.exe running (right now, 5).
Thank you so much for your help, this issue has been driving me up the wall and I just could not get it to stop.
Vsi odgovori (4)
There is a known issue where multiple instances of plugin container open if history or cookies are cleared. Are you, or some utility clearing firefox cookies or history, that could be the reason. This problem continues even if plugins are disabled in Firefox.
- Are you opening multiple instances of Flash Player ?
- Is the problem reproducible ?
for instance does it always crash the plugin or cause it to hang if you use a particular site ?
If you get the FlashPlayer plugin crashing use the option to submit the crash reports, it is then possible to follow them up. It is possible to stop the plugincontainer opening, but that could result in a firefox crash. Of course the firefox crash can also send crash reports out, and that could be useful.
There are some problems with FlashPlayer currently under investigation, and there may be other threads in the forum about problems. (e.g. Bug 561019 - Plugin waveOutOpen hangs )
Sometimes using Firefox 3.6 is a workaround that helps with FlashPlayer problems, if you wish to experiment with that consider installing firefox Portable and using Firefox 3.6.23 (or soon 3.6.24) for tests with flash player, whilst keeping firefox 7 for day to day browsing.
Make sure that you allow the plugin-container process in the firewall.
Remove all rules for Firefox from the permissions list in the firewall and let your firewall ask again for permission to get full unrestricted access to internet for Firefox and the plugin-container process and the updater process.
See also:
Hello, Yesterday, FireFox prompted me to install an update to the latest version (Firefox 8.0 Beta 6). Now, the issue is no longer happening. I'm guessing whatever was causing it must have been a bug that has now been fixed. The issue hasn't happened yet since installing, whereas it would happen multiple times in a single session.
Thanks for the support! -JZ
Thanks for posting back, glad the problem is resolved.
I have mentioned before that using Beta for day to day browsing could be a sensible strategy
- it is relatively stable, and has had pre-testing on Nightly & Aurora channels
- it gets fixes before the Release channel
- you always have a fallback to a supported release version if anything does break.
Maybe if the problems with add-on compatibility on upgrade/switching are resolved a User Interface channel switching option will be re-instated.