Hacker News Reader

Comment by 5ilv3r | Hacker News Reader

"The OpenH264 codec is not distributed with Firefox but gets downloaded at the first start of Firefox. In case you want to prohibit that, you will have to preconfigure the browser and set the media.gmp-gmpopenh264.autoupdatemedia.gmp-gmpopenh264.enabled preference to false. "

I have to disable it before I START firefox?? How?

View on HN

In your Firefox profile directory, there's a file called "prefs.js". Of course, that (obviously) requires you have a FF profile, so I'm not sure how much use it would be.

I guess the "easier" way would be to just disconnect your internet, and then install and start Firefox.

Sounds like an option for domain administrators... not users.

That's a bummer.

If you start firefox with the `-P` option, then it lets you manually create a profile, before starting. I assume you could configure it at that point.

Alternately, before starting Firefox:

    echo 'user_pref("media.gmp-gmpopenh264.autoupdatemedia.gmp-gmpopenh264.enabled", false);' >> user.js

Preferences set in the user.js file are applied after those in prefs.js, but are persistent - while the current prefs settings are saved to prefs.js when Firefox exits, the prefs in user.js are re-applied on every restart of Firefox - so you would have to edit user.js to persistently change Firefox' behavior.

Thus user.js is handy for knowledgeable users, but could be a bit of a trap for less capable users. ("I can't make it change!")

While I'm on about:config stuff, a handy way to search for config variables is a shortcut:

    <DT><A HREF="about:config?filter=%s" SHORTCUTURL="ac">[ac] about:config filter</A>

invoked by putting, say,

    ac media.gmp

in the address bar.

You could disable your network connection before starting Firefox and then change the preference.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com