I have had a lot of freeze ups since upgrading to 3.6.6.

Agreed that this version was supposed to work better with plug-ins, but seems worse.

I've run the plug-in checker, and I'm up to date with Flash and all my others. Still getting the freezes and messages about "plugin container for Firefox has stopped working".

Today I tried a go-to-meeting session and it just hung. Had to use IE :-(

A couple other websites I use regularly will now not operate either.

Oh, forgot

FF: 3.6.6

OS: Vista 32-bit

I was using FF and 10.1 of Flash well to just a few hours ago then it kept on crashing constantly anytime I went to anywhere with Flash running. only think I did withing the last few hours was a computer restart and after that restart all theses issues started.

Windows 7 x64 FF 3.6.6

I can't open any windows on manhunt.net. I don't think it is flash, either.

I have to use IE to make the site work.

Maybe time to switch to opera or chrome?

Read the post on page 2 by AntiPluginContainer. That's the temporarily solution for this problem. And also you can change the value of the last item to "-1" as well.

Please help. Flash videos crash my FF 3.6.6

windows 7 64 bit ff 3.6.6 flash 10.1 NO FireTorrent plugin or add-on

If I completely disable the plugin containers in about:config, FF hangs.

If I turn them back on and drop the timeout to 10, the crash protection works, but no flash runs.

So, FF is only usable if I want to wait 10 seconds for every flash app to fail, and don't want flash... Meaning, it's not usable.

It also just started happening to me today, after a reboot. Something that doesn't get set until a complete system reboot rather than just a FF restart kicks in apparently.

 Firefox 3.6.6 loads slow, crashes within a minute or two EVERY time, gives option to report, on my brand new MacBook Pro running OSX 10.6.3. 

Model Name: MacBook Pro

 Model Identifier:	MacBookPro6,1
 Processor Name:	Intel Core i5
 Processor Speed:	2.53 GHz
 Number Of Processors:	1
 Total Number Of Cores:	2
 L2 Cache (per core):	256 KB
 L3 Cache:	3 MB
 Memory:	4 GB
 Processor Interconnect Speed:	4.8 GT/s
 Boot ROM Version:	MBP61.0057.B0A
 SMC Version (system):	1.57f17
 Hardware UUID:	132A95C4-4821-5402-97A8-27B049FFB0B6
 State:	Enabled

Like Johnnyappleseed, I too have dropped FF for another browser. It's a shame, I've been using FF for as long as I remember. And the funny part is mine crashes without even navigating to a site with flash at all! Simply switching between the DL manager and FF main window causes a crash sometimes.

Hello Opera!!!

Win 7 Ultimate x64... had same problem. latest Flash & Shockwave. as well as Java.

I disabled FireTorrent and no crash so far. So I uninstalled FireTorrent.

I think we have a FireTorrent/Flash conflict still in 3.6.6 with newest Flash. (older flash still crashed FF even with FireTorrent disabled.) I didn't disable plugin manager, but may if it happens any more.

so much f*** just with one browser. IE sucks, Chrome cannot forward app>to>url Opera good but too many trash.

I also get user account control message that pops up every time I try to sign on? Asking do you want to allow the following program to make changes to this computer. How do I get rid of it.

I'm having the same issues as stated and fixes suggested either do not apply (i.e. disabling bit torrent) or just aren't working. What I want to know is WHERE is Mozilla support? user forums are great but support from the folks who created and distributed this dung heap is even better.

Moderator edit: Removed unrelated image -MJB

For me it all seems to be something to do with a thing called Plugin Container for Firefox. I have disabled all my addons and plugins except for the flash viewer so the following example uses flash pages (specifically YouTube pages) to test what I think is a memory leak in Firefox.

I am not sure what happens when using other plugins but I wouldn't be surprised if it is something similar to the results that I outline below.

If you can't be bothered following the steps I have outlined and seeing for yourself what is happening to your system while running Firefox then skip to the bottom where I offer my solution.

You can see what is going on in windows by doing the following:

1. Make sure firefox is closed and open your windows task manager (hit ctrl alt del and select start task manager) and click on the processes tab.

2.Open firefox on a page without any flash. (Note: If you have a home page with flash on it or "re-open firefox windows and tabs" as your starting page then this won't work. To set your start page to a blank page go open firefox go to the tools->options->general-> and select "show a blank page for your "When firefox starts" option".once you have done this close and reopen firefox)

3.Once you have firefox opened on a blank page look at the processes tab in your task manager and you will see that there is a process open for Firefox and it is probably using about 25Mb of memory.

4.Now open a page that you know has flash on it. The YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/) home page is a perfect example. Two things will happen in your task manager firstly your memory usage for firefox will jump from the original 25Mb to about 42Mb secondly firefox will start another process called Plugin Container for Firefox which will be using about 13MB of memory

5. now open a youtube video link in a new tab (just right click any video link on the home page and select the open link in new tab option) you will see that memory usage for both the firefox.exe process and the Plugin Container for Firefox process jumps up significantly at this for me both of these processes jumped up to about 50 Meg of ram at this point (I am working through the steps) .

6. Repeat step 5 and monitor the memory usage in task manager eventually Firefox will freeze up. For me, as I am typing this, I was only able to open 3 YouTube pages in 3 tabs before it froze. Prior to version 3.6.6 (should be renamed version 6.6.6) I would regularly have u pto 10 tabs or more running simultaneously without any serious crashes.

7. Once Firefox locks up you can unfreeze it by killing the "Plugin Container for Firefox". (Simply go to your task manager right click on the process and select end process a dialogue box will pop up with a warning message about what ending the process will do....Just click End process).

8. Now return to your browser. You will find that it is unfrozen yay! however you will also note that any flash objects will be displaying a greyed out box with a message saying The adobe plugin has crashed. Boo!!

9. Have a look at your task manager and note that even though the flashes aren't running the memory used by firefox has not been reduced. Hmmmmmm?

10. try refreshing one of the youtube pages you have open by hitting the browser refresh button you will note that the good ol plugin container process has restarted and that mem usage for firefox jumps up again (for me it popped up by about 12Mb to around 62MB and the plugin container is using about 42Mb) When I refresh all 3 tabs I had open before the freeze I can see that my memory usage for Firefox is about 72Mb and the Plugin Container is about 74Mb. But Firefox is still running.

11. try opening a few more YouTube links in new tabs. I was able to open another 2 and FireFox froze again. FF is now using 77Mb of memorie and the plugin container is using 156Mb.

12. Kill the plugin container by repeating step 7 you will note that, as in step 8, your browser is unfrozen but flash is broken. interestingly however Firefox is still hanging on to the 76Mb of memory

13. Repeat step 10 refreshing all your tabs I was able to refresh 2 before FF froze again and the mem usage has jumped up to 85Mb with the plugin container using only 85Mb so I kill the Plugin Container process as per step 7. Every time I do this I find that the browser unfreezes but the memory usage for firefox keeps increasing.

14. After a morning of repeating this process every time firefox locked up I found that my browser was crawling and then noticed in the task manager that firefox was holding onto about 750Mb of memory even if I closed down the plugin container What's more closing down all but one tab had very little effect the amount of memory firefox is hanging onto. Only by restarting the browser could I get it to free up my system resources.

Solution: Sorry Mozilla people but Until you release a version that properly dumps memory when a process ends your browser IMHO is essentially unusable. To be honest I can't believe that you guys let a release go live with something like this happening.

For now I am and will continue to use Google Chrome. It opens a separate instance of itself for every tab and releases system resources as you close a tab.

For all you devs Chrome has a set of dev tools built in that work in a similar way to Firebug, use them instead.

Oh and by the way, no I don't work for Google I am just an average web designer/developer trying to make sense of this crazy interweb thing.

Good luck peeps.

Steve

Steve Furness:

Did you read the post by AntiPluginContainer on page 2 and my post above before you posted your "lengthy" post? If you follow the instructions, it'll disable the plugin-container. Almost all users have no problem after they disable it. So why don't you try it?

Minha versão do Firefox está atualizada (3.6.6) mas não consigo abrir vídeos no youtube. My Firefox's version is updated (3.6.6) but I can't open videos on youtube.

Same problem here with OS 10.6.4. Very frustrating. Love Firefox but this could finally make me give chrome a look

3.6.6 is so bad (slow and crashes) that i'm even thinking of going back to IE !!!!

@silk phoenix

Thanks Silk. I tried to disable the plugin container as per your suggestion but for some reason it won't let me toggle dom.ipc.plugins.enabled.npctrl.dll

Having said this it still seems that I have managed to disable plugin container by toggling the other dlls and it has stopped firefox from crashing while opening flash videos.

Firefox still seems to be hanging on to memory even after I close down tabs. A single browser instance with a google search result is hanging on to 100Mb of ram as opposed to a chrome browser tab which only uses about 12 MB of ram for the same page.

same problem here running XPSP3 on laptop.