Firefox Out of Process Config

I have run into a problem with Firefox when viewing a pdf. The pdf would not finish downloading or take a long time and it would lock up the entire browser. I couldn't switch to another tab or do anything. For some reason this seemed to happen very often when reading academic papers found on Google Scholar.

Since 3.6.4 Firefox has had the option of having a plugin run in another process. It is part of the Electrolysis project. By default  QuickTime, Flash, and Silverlight on their own process, but you can also manually add other plugins via about:config.

I wanted to add Adobe reader to see if this would help and this is how I did it.

Open about:config

right click and create a new boolean preference

name it dom.ipc.plugins.enabled.nppdf32.dll

set the boolean value to True


Restart the browser for the settings to take effect. This setting can be reversed by changing the boolean value to False.


For other plugins you can create by adding the plugin name. Those name can be found in about:plugin.