[clue-tech] How to hide plugins from your browser

[Jed S. Baer]

Hi Folks.

Well, I finally got ambitious and switched from Fedora to Kubuntu. Only a
few glitches, of which only one is really a big deal to me. I will note
that there is, in fact, a .deb equivalent to rpm hell -- I'm surprised I
came across it so quickly, but that's a digression for another time.

My only big complaint is that I can't reproduce the results I was getting
under Fedora Core 4, with respect to browser plugins.

Most of my web browsing, I do in Galeon, with no flash player, javascript
off, and cookies disabled. Plus, I pipe it through privoxy. So, I suffer
through a minimum of useless ads and animations, and pages load faster.
But, for those times when I really want to check out a YouTube video, or
do some online shopping, and visit a couple sites where having javascript
and cookies was a necessity, I had Mozilla configured more promiscuously.
For whatever reason, under FC4, Galeon was not picking up plugins that
Mozilla was, and all was right in the world.

I have yet to try this with Mozilla (yeah, they're calling it icemonkey,
or something), because I thought I'd try Firefox out for a bit. I don't
know that that matters, because it used to be that plugins got put in
the /usr/lib/mozilla{version string}/plugins directory, and now I see
them going into /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/ (as symbolic links, but that
shouldn't matter). So I guess it used to be that Galeon wouldn't look
in /usr/lib/mozilla{whatever}, but now does. Since Galeon hasn't been
updated in some time, I assume this is a difference in compile options
used by the Fedora packager, vs. the Ubuntu packager. (Yes, packager in
this case meaning a person.) But it gets worse. I removed the symbolic
links from /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/, but Galeon still finds it. The only
way I can see this happening is that Galeon is actually looking at the
pluginreg.dat file used by Firefox, or maybe there's some
behind-the-scenes configurator thingie (along the lines of gconf?) which
both are using -- maybe they're sharing a copy of some of the gecko
engine. Anyways, I rm -rf'd the /usr/lib/flashplugin-nonfree/ dir where
the flashplayer lived. Then I re-installed it as a "local" install, i.e.
under ~/.mozilla/plugins/, and Galeon happily found it there.

Also, just moving the flashplayer.so to someplace else doesn't work, even
if I edit firefox's pluginreg.dat to point to it. I wonder if Firefox is
regenerating that file from some hidden XML config someplace. (No, said
Miquel, it isn't like the Windows registry! -- how I miss the days when
you could just pull your config files up in vi, edit them and have it
work.)

As a last resort, I tried starting Galeon with the --oaf-private switch.
No dice.

So, I'm at the point of creating a dummy user, and invoking galeon with a
'su -c galeon - dummy' so it can't see the dir where the flashplayer is
installed. That seems like a needless complication, but in doing some web
searches for selectively disabling plugins, I came up empty-handed.
Looking at about:config and prefs.js was equally fruitless.

So, if anyone has any words of wisdom, I'm all ears.

jed