How to prevent silent plugin installs?
Every time I update Adobe Acrobat, its plugin is silently added to my list of Firefox plugins, and enabled. Same for some Windows updates that silently add or update the Silverlight plugin. The issue is that I don't need those plugins under Firefox and would rather keep them disabled. It's a bit frustrating to have to disable them one by one each time.
My question: Is there any way to prevent silent plugin installs, or at least to get a user prompt like for extensions? Thanks.
Chosen solution
Are you uninstalling plugins or disable them in the program or are you only disabling the plugins in Firefox?
If you disable a plugin in Firefox then I don't think that an update will re-enable it.
Newly detected plugin are quite likely to get enabled by default and I'm not aware of a way to prevent that.
All Replies (7)
Adobe Reader Plugin for Firefox
- Adobe Acrobat browser plugin is for displaying PDF documents within Firefox and other Web browsers.
- For more details, see this article -> Use Adobe Reader to view PDF files in Firefox
Silverlight Plugin for Firefox
- Microsoft Silverlight plugin is used by some websites to display multimedia content.
- For more details, see this article -> Use the Silverlight plugin to play audio and video
These Plugins provide additional features to Firefox on some websites, so it's better if you don't Disable these two plugins.
- For more information on Firefox Plugins, see this article -> Use plugins to play audio, video, games and more
Thanks for the links mha007. To open PDFs I prefer to launch Acrobat, and when I need to use Silverlight I just open IE.
I like to use as few plugins as possible (for security, speed, etc). So it is a bit frustrating when applications can silently add others without you being notified.
Chosen Solution
Are you uninstalling plugins or disable them in the program or are you only disabling the plugins in Firefox?
If you disable a plugin in Firefox then I don't think that an update will re-enable it.
Newly detected plugin are quite likely to get enabled by default and I'm not aware of a way to prevent that.
If you dont want to have silverlight, you can remove it from Programs and Features in the Windows Control Panel and refuse to install it with windows updates later on.
About Adobe Reader, I recommend removing it as well and installing Evince. It is a lightweight reader without the need to patch it constantly since it doesnt have vulnerabilities like Adobe does. Of course this means it is a lot safer as well.
You can find it here:
@cor-el: I am just disabling plugins in Firefox, not uninstalling programs. Yes I think the issue is more with new plugin installs (but I think I had it with plugin updates too, for instance the Java ones). Thanks for the info and details, that answers my question.
@ffxsf: That's an option, but I still like to have Silverlight in IE for some sites. So I would not uninstall the whole application. Thanks for the links.
Evince is a PDF viewer for Linux, so it won't work on Windows.
Wrong, if you just would have checked my download link you would have seen theres a windows download for it.
I use it on windows so I guess it is for windows :P
Even on your own link, the wikipedia page says it is for windows :D
Modified by ffxsf