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

[Jed S. Baer]

On Sun, 19 Aug 2007 17:54:23 -0600
Jed S. Baer wrote:

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

Nevermind recapping all that. I had an inspiration. Didn't work, but maybe I'm doing it wrong.

The goal is to have Galeon not find the flashplayer plugins, but have them work in firefox.

I noticed, somewhere along the line, that firefox was putting symbolic links into /usr/lib/firefox/plugins for the flashplayer files. So I thought to just put the actually files there. However, Galeon will happily find them there as well. So I started thinking about how to make them unreadable by Galeon instead.

So, I created the flashuser group.
I changed the group of the firefox executable to flashuser.
I set the setgid bit on the firefox executable.
I changed the group of the flashplayer files to flashuser.
I did a chmod 750/740 on the flashplayer files.

So now, unless I misunderstand something, Firefox will run as group flashuser, thus being able to access the flashplayer files. Galeon won't.

jbaer at robinson:/usr/lib/firefox$ ls -l firefox
-rwxr-sr-x 1 root flashuser 8625 2007-07-31 07:52 firefox

jbaer at robinson:/usr/lib/firefox/plugins$ ls -l
total 6904
-rwxr----- 1 root flashuser     856 2007-09-19 20:01 flashplayer.xpt
-rwxr-x--- 1 root flashuser 7040036 2007-09-19 20:01 libflashplayer.so

(previously, perms on flashplayer.xpt were -r--r--r--)

When I run Firefox, and navigate to a page with flash:
LoadPlugin: failed to initialize shared library /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/libflashplayer.so [/usr/lib/firefox/plugins/libflashplayer.so: cannot open shared object file: Permission denied]

So, what am I missing?

jed