What is Plugin-Container.exe when Firefox is running?

The users of Mozilla Firefox would have seen a new process which pops out time to time when it’s being run on the web browser. The process which is called as Plugin container appears and disappears when the Firefox browser is running on some of the websites.

Mozilla has recently added the so called out-of-process plugins to the Mozilla Firefox web browser. This specific feature runs on some of the famous Firefox plugins, like Adobe’s Flash Player, Apple’s Quick time or even Microsoft Silverlight which in their own process whenever they are needed to execute the elements on the specific web pages.

First lets know what is a plugin, plugin is basically a small piece of software which displays the web content that Firefox is not designed to display which includes audio, video, online games and even the presentations which are generally made in the patented formats. These plugins are created and are distributed by the companies which make these patented formats. The plugin-container.exe process is just the extra process which is launched whenever one of the supported plugins is being started up in the Firefox.

From the Firefox 3.6.4 and above releases, some of the plugins are loaded separately from Firefox in the plugin container executable file which allows the main Mozilla Firefox process to stay open even if the plugin crashes.