Why does Firefox keep launching 3, 4, 5 incidences of itself (in task manager) - slowly but consistently increases over time.
Firefox originally opened one "task" in task manager and worked fine. Later, it started opening two "incidences" or itself, and crashed if I tried to close one. Then the number rose to three, and today it opened 5 'tasks' in task manager, each one using enough operating memory to run the entire program as a stand alone function. Is this a bug or something that 'needs' to happen due to upgrades?
I also noticed that Firefox program folders were all updated today when I went in looking for a 'culprit' and that makes it hard for me to track down. I also notice in properties that five Firefox version changes have loaded to my computer in the last week.
I do not like this - what do you recommend?
Saafara biñ tànn
In the Windows 7 Task Manager, the Applications tab should have a Firefox instance for each open window, while the Processes tab should have 2 to 5 instances of firefox.exe. The reason for the variable number is the multiprocess feature which isolates content from the user interface into one process, then uses between 1 and 4 processes for web pages. This helps prevent a crash caused by the content of one tab from crashing the entire browser, but it does use somewhat more memory than putting everything in one huge bucket.
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Same here.
Saafara yiñ Tànn
In the Windows 7 Task Manager, the Applications tab should have a Firefox instance for each open window, while the Processes tab should have 2 to 5 instances of firefox.exe. The reason for the variable number is the multiprocess feature which isolates content from the user interface into one process, then uses between 1 and 4 processes for web pages. This helps prevent a crash caused by the content of one tab from crashing the entire browser, but it does use somewhat more memory than putting everything in one huge bucket.
Is there a way to stop that?
In Firefox 49-55 you could switch back to single process using the following steps, but I don't know if this is still applicable. You could give it a try.
To help evaluate whether the Multiprocess (e10s) feature is causing problems, you could turn it off as follows:
(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter/Return. Click the button promising to be careful.
(2) In the search box above the list, type or paste autos and pause while the list is filtered
(3) Double-click the browser.tabs.remote.autostart.2 preference to switch the value from true to false
Note: the exact name of the preference(s) may vary, but it will start with browser.tabs.remote.autostart
At your next Firefox startup, it should run in the traditional way. Any difference?
I hate "be careful" buttons, but it's worth a try. It appears that these "multiples" are eating up too much processing power and actually causing more crashes (I get more low-memory warnings and crashes since this started as well).