Firefox plug-in container's problem

by Forrest Sheng Bao http://fsbao.net

Firefox's market share has just been passed by Chrome. If they wanna catch up, Firefox really needs to fix many problems of itself. Its plug-in container on Linux should be on top of their list.

I use two important plug-ins in Firefox, Adobe PDF reader and flash player. But they sometimes do not work after having been used in Firefox for a while, e.g., after you open several tabs of PDF files.

I am not alone. For example, ever since Ubuntu 9.10, the Firefox (around 3.0) shipped with Ubuntu Linux has had problem with Adobe PDF reader: http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-1385589.html  Somebody even created a ticket at Firefox Help: http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/891508


And I also notice that when playing Flash movies, Firefox's plug-in container takes a lot of CPU resources. This does not happen on Chrome.

I assume this plug-in container problem only happens on Linux platform. But since Linux is a growing market, it may not be a good idea to ignore this problem.