Disable Firefox Missing Plugin Notification

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Whenever you visit a media rich website (it’s hard to avoid them these days), you’ll likely be asked to install Adobe’s Flash player or Shockwave player, Microsoft’s Silverlight plugin, Apple’s Quick-time plugin, Oracle’s Java runtime environment, or any number of other web browser plugins.. The fact is that you likely don’t need all (or any) of them. Not only are there safer alternatives not built into your browser, but HTML 5 puts more power/functionality into modern web browsers so such plugins will become more useless.

Web browser plugins are a big cause of infected computers. Just visiting a website could get you infected because you’re automatically downloading some content, even if you don’t explicitly decide to download it.

The plugins themselves can even be used for malicious purposes. Advertisers and such are using (or abusing, depending on perspective) the Adobe Flash player plugin and placing Flash cookies (aka. “Super” cookies) on computers. Since these are saved within the Adobe cache, they aren’t deleted through your web browser’s “Delete Cookies” option. In order to delete them, you had to go online to the Flash player Settings Manager and adjust your Flash settings there. Fortunately, Adobe came around and now allow adjusting Flash player settings within your computer’s Control Panel.

To improve Internet browsing security, don’t install unnecessary plugins and uninstall the unnecessary ones you already have. As I mentioned, however, Firefox will bug you about installing the missing plugin when you load a website asking for it.

You can disable this notification by making a simple adjustment on Firefox’s Configuration page.

  1. Open it up by typing about:config in the Address Bar. Read the prompt and click the button saying you’ll be careful. (See how to re-enable that warning prompt)
  2. Locate the preference plugins.hide_infobar_for_missing_plugin
  3. Simply double-click it to change the value from False to True.

Posted in: Web Browsers

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is the site owner of Computer Tech Tips and is passionate about computer technology, particularly Windows-based software, malware removal, and web development. He enjoys helping people troubleshoot computer problems and providing technical support to family, friends, and people around the net. Xps wrote 78 article(s) for Computer Tech Tips.

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Comments (2)

  1. jay sato says:
    at

    Is there any way to do this in chromium based browser like comodo dragon and aviator?

  2. Xps says:
    at

    Hi Jay. I finally got a day off and was able to look around and install Dragon for myself. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear that it’s possible, at least without taking a deep look into the development of Chromium.

    The good thing is that you’re not alone. In my looking around, I found a number of people who wish for such a basic feature. The bad part is that these discussions span 5 years, so it’s unlikely the Chromium-based developers will do anything about it soon.

    All major browsers should just have a basic check-box on their Plugins page, but they’re more focused on looks than functionality, unfortunately.

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