Plugin-container.exe is a Firefox process that is used to load plugins separately so if a plugin crashes for whatever reason, Firefox won’t be affected by the crash and will stay responsive.

Since there are a lot of people experiencing problems with the plugin-container process I wanted to provide you with two easy methods for disabling it.

In older versions of Firefox it was possible to disable plugin-container.exe by following the steps below.

First method

1. Enter about:config in your address bar
2. Search for dom.ipc.plugins.enabled
3. Set their values to false

Sadly the above method doesn’t seem to work anymore with the newer versions of Firefox. Luckily there is a different workaround which can achieve the same exact result by setting a system or a user environment variable. Follow the steps below if the first method did not work for you.

Second method

1. Right click on your computer icon on the desktop and click properties
2. Go to Advance system settings
3. Click the button called "Environment Variables"
4. Click the “New” button under User variables or System variables depending if you want the change to affect all the users on the system or just the one you are currently logged as
5. Set the variable name to MOZ_DISABLE_OOP_PLUGINS and its value to 1

And that is all you have to do. Now simply restart Firefox and you will notice that the plugin-container.exe process will not be used any more.