How to stop Quicktime hijacking audio/mpeg (mp3) in Firefox
Wednesday, August 27th, 2008This 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