That actually doens't sound like a plugin issue, it sounds like Hardware acceleration is causing a problem. Have the user disable it and see if things are better.

Turning off hardware acceleration

Thanks for the response. I've tried turning off hardware acceleration and that does not have an impact on FF's performance.

craig_hatler said

I have a Firefox user who yesterday reported that all of a sudden his FF was running like molasses. Not just navigating to sites, but clicking from one field to another, entering data, etc. The only add-ons he has are plug-ins, and all of them are "never activate" except for Flash Player and Acrobat (Reader) DC. When I ran FF in Safe Mode (add-ons disabled), it worked like normal. Here's what my question really is. I don't want to just disable/"never activate" these plug-ins, I want to rip them out of Firefox forever. There are some in there that look pointless, the user never installed them. At this point all I care about is that his base FF experience is smooth. My Google-fu so far has been weak, and so far all it looks like is that this process would be painful, time-consuming, and involve code which looks like it's over my head. Can anyone recommend anything to make this less painful?

Although the menu item refers to disabling add-ons, it is the Extensions that are disabled in Safe Mode, not the plugins. You can review those and manually disable the nonessential ones on the Add-ons page. Either:

• Ctrl+Shift+a
• "3-bar" menu button (or Tools menu) > Add-ons

In the left column, click Extensions. Then, if in doubt, disable.

Often a link will appear above at least one disabled extension to restart Firefox. You can complete your work on the tab and click one of the links as the last step.

I'm not talking about extensions. I'm talking about plugins. Why can I not just remove them, the same with extensions?

Plugins are third-party software injected into Firefox. You can disable them, which is the same as removing them. If you want to fully uninstall them you have to do by uninstalling the program using your OS's add/remove programs feature.

To expand on that, Firefox finds most plugins through registry keys that third party software uses to advertise their availability to Firefox. In rare cases, installers drop plugins into the Firefox program folder, and some extensions may drop a plugin into the user profile folder.

If there is not an easy way to uninstall a plugin, the path of the plugin on disk can be found on the about:plugins page (type or paste about:plugins into the address bar and press Enter). Although it could lead to unpredictable results, you could try renaming the unwanted .dll files with a nonfunctional extension such as .old to hide them.