Disabling Adobe PDF plugin in Firefox

Why you should disable the Adobe PDF plugin in Firefox

We have found a number of machines becoming unresponsive, perhaps for hours at a time. The investigations we have been able to make show that at these times the Adobe Reader acroread has been using all the memory on the machine. The machine will kill processes to make more memory available, eventually it kills acroread and the machine becomes responsive again.

Experience suggests that acroread is much less likely (perhaps never) to use up all the memory if Firefox starts a new standalone instance of acroread (displaying each PDF in its own Acrobat window), rather than running it as a plugin and displaying the document in a Firefox window.

How to disable the plugin

From the "Tools" menu select "Add-ons", the click on the "Plugins" icon at the top right:

Click on the Adobe Reader brick (it may say 8.0 or 9.0). To disable the plugin ensure that the button on the right says Enable. If it says Disable", click it.