How to stop Quicktime hijacking audio/mpeg (mp3) in Firefox
This frustrated the shit out of me. My setup: Vista Business SP1, Firefox 3.0.1, Quicktime 7.5 (861).
No matter how hard I tried, besides disabling the Quicktime plugin in Vista, moving/deleting npqtplugin4.dll in the Firefox plugins folder or hex editing it, Firefox 3.0.1 would always play any mp3s I clicked in a full screen Quicktime plugin.
The about:plugins shows the following:
QuickTime Plug-in 7.5 (861)
- File name:
npqtplugin4.dll - The QuickTime Plugin allows you to view a wide variety of multimedia content in Web pages. For more information, visit the QuickTime Web site.
| MIME Type | Description | Suffixes | Enabled |
|---|---|---|---|
| video/mpeg | MPEG media | mpeg,mpg,m1s,m1v,m1a,m75, m15,mp2,mpm,mpv,mpa | Yes |
| audio/mpeg | MPEG audio | mpeg,mpg,m1s,m1a,mp2,mpm, mpa,m2a | Yes |
| audio/x-mpeg | MPEG audio | mpeg,mpg,m1s,m1a,mp2,mpm, mpa,m2a | Yes |
| video/3gpp | 3GPP media | 3gp,3gpp | Yes |
How the hell do you change one of those values to say “enabled: no”?
Changing Mime Type associations in Firefox via Options -> Applications does nothing - Quicktime always gets there first
Changing Mime Settings in Quicktime Preferences launches Vista’s Set Program Associations which is also fruitless
After much digging around, I have worked out that the following will let you handle audio/mpeg (mp3) the way you want:
- Go to about:config
- Type ‘plugin’ in the filter box (minus quotes)
- Look for ‘plugin.disable_full_page_plugin_for_types’
- If it already exists and contains a value, add ‘,audio/mpeg’ to the end of it, otherwise just change the value to ‘audio/mpeg’
- Fully close Firefox, wait a few seconds for it to clean up and die
- Launch Firefox again.. click an MP3 link.. voila! it does whatever you’ve specified in your Firefox Options -> Applications
September 4th, 2008 at 12:01 pm
please explain this in terms a moron like me can understand. I ABSOLUTELY HATE how Quick Time hijacks everything, but this message does not help me. Go to about: config? wtf????
September 15th, 2008 at 6:00 pm
Type about:config in the Firefox location bar.. I’m assuming you’re using Firefox as that is what this post is about
November 4th, 2008 at 9:54 am
Hi Mark,
You’re a legend!
This one has driven me totally craAaaAAAzy.
I hate quickslime anyway plus accidentally invoking it always hung FF and usually crashed my machine.
If Mozilla is so open saucy they should make this the default setting.
But now thanks to you it’s not something I have to ever worry about again.
IOU at least a slab of beer.
Thanks Mate
John 8~)