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Resolved Question

Firefox on Windows 7

by Mar 5, 2012 7:04AM PST

Dell Inspiron 1545
Firefox 10
Windows 7

I am experiencing difficulties when re-opening F'fox. You close it on the shortcut, that works fine, but, when you want to re-open it it informs you that it is still running, but it isn't, or there's nothing to indicate it is. The delay can be a good few seconds at best, with up to a couple of minutes. Sometimes I have re-start the pc.
I've reinstalled to no avail. Any advice please.

Discussion is locked

Art Keetra has chosen the best answer to their question. View answer
5 Posts
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Best Answer

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As the others have said ...
by Mar 5, 2012 10:52AM PST

Firefox often does this while cleaning up after itself and one of the processes responsible is named plugin-container.exe which, depending on the exact plug-ins you have installed and enabled can take a few minutes.

If it takes more than 3-6 minutes and other processes aren't using the CPU to any extent you might try killing firefox.ece and plugin-continer.exe manually via your TaskManager.

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Firefox in Windows
by Art Keetra Mar 5, 2012 10:42PM PST

Cheers guys, much appreciated.
I suspect it is a plugin as the problem is relatively recent.

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F'fox on W'dows 7
by Art Keetra Mar 6, 2012 2:34AM PST

Issue resolved, it appeared to be an out of date plugin.
Many thanks chaps.

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Answer
It's Usually Related to Add-ons
by Forum moderator Mar 5, 2012 7:29AM PST

I also have seen similar, but generally, it's only a few seconds.. On a few of my customer's computers, if they close FF 10 after viewing Adobe documents, or Flash videos, or something similar from within the browser, then it tends to take longer for FF to close out. Of course, slower computers with small amounts of RAM may take longer to close-out running programs as well..

I'm not sure how you fix that except to make the problem known to the folks at Mozilla.....or.... disable all unnecessary add-ons within the FF user interface.

Hope this helps.

Grif

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Answer
It happens
by Mar 5, 2012 8:46AM PST

It happens, though usually it's a once every so many blue moons kind of thing. Griff's advice is pretty good, and I'd just add to that now is as good a time as any to audit your extensions and plugins, decide whether or not you really need all of them. If not, get rid of them.

And as a temporary workaround, you can always use task manager to forcefully kill the firefox process. Just don't be too quick on the trigger, since as Grif mentions, there are legitimate "tidying up" tasks programs tend to do when shut down. The exact amount of time you should wait depends on the particulars of your system, but I'd say 5 minutes is a good general cutoff point. If, after 5 minutes, it's still going... That's USUALLY a long enough good-faith length of time to wait.

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