It bothers me when inline webpage content starts playing automatically within the browser.  99% of the time, if I want to see/hear multimedia content, I want it to be in an external player.  For example, when trying to play an MP3 playlist in an M3U file, I want it to play in XMMS, not in MPlayer within Firefox.

And actually that’s how it worked until about a month ago, when some upgraded package on my Ubuntu system messed things up.  Now all the M3U links that I clicked would start playing in MPlayer within Firefox... yuck.

Flashblock is a great Firefox extension that prevents all Flash content from playing unless/until you click on the content.  That’s truly fantastic.  But what about other types of content, like M3U?  I recently learned how to prevent Firefox from launching an internal plug-in to handle any given content, instead displaying the Open/Save dialog.

Just type about:config into the address bar (and press Enter).  Then type plugin.disable into the "Filter:" field.  This should display something like:

plugin.disable_full_page_plugin_for_types

...which had the following value on my system

application/x-quicktimeplayer,video/x-ms-wm

So just double-click on that and add this to the end of the list:

audio/basic,audio/mpegurl,audio/x-mpegurl

Restart Firefox and presto, clicking on M3U links now displays the Open/Save dialog.

Also, if you go to the about:config page and change the value to "false" for browser.download.hide_plugins_without_extensions, then you’ll be able to control many more media types when you go to Preferences -> Content -> Manage.