firefox: can't choose plugins for individual mime types

[Robert Persson]

Binary package hint: firefox

In Firefox you can't specify which plugin is to deal with which mime type. The lack of this functionality makes dealing with embedded media in Firefox a very ugly experience.

The reason this functionality is particularly important is this: Plugins such as the mplayer and xine ones can handle most media you throw at them, but they usually don't do it gracefully. For instance you often have to wait for the whole file to download before playback will start. Sometimes you wait for the whole file to download only to find that it doesn't play anyway. The VLC plugin used to crash my browser so I haven't tried using it recently. For this reason I find myself forced to use the realplayer plugin, which works much better, but only plays a limited range of media types. This means that when I try to play streams from, for instance, http://concertzender.nl, I am s**t out of luck. I get a message telling me that the mime-type x-mplayer2 is not recognised.

The only workaround I know is to use Opera (which does let you specify plugins by mime type) to access these particular streams, in other words to open a second browser whenever Firefox complains about a missing plugins. More than any other application, browsers should "just work". They should work as well as they do in Windows or Mac OS. Any bugs or missing features that prevent this from happening are very serious ones.

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

the mozilla project is aware of this issue. Its open if firefox 3.0 will deal with this, but I can assure you that they are working on it.

[seth (seth-brightphoton)]

This is a deal breaker for firefox. I've spent hours googling and trying to associate mime types and executables and I had to give up completely. What other choice do I have but to go to opera?

An interim solution would be realllly welcome before 3.0.

[Robert Persson (ireneshusband)]

I have discovered a partial workaround. The mplayer plugin package actually installs several plugins for different types of media. If you simply go to your internet plugins folder and delete the mplayer realmedia plugin (I can't remember what it's called because I've already deleted mine), then the realplayer plugin will take its place as the handler for .ra .ram etc. Other sound and video formats will continue to be handled by the mplayer plugins.