How to Disable In-built Media Player in Firefox

Starting with Firefox version 21, the popular web browser now supports playing of the MP3, MP4 and other media files that use the AAC or H.264 codecs. This feature is available for Firefox version 21 and later for Windows 7 and above as it makes use of the Windows Media Foundation feature. So if you now click on an MP3 file link, Firefox would start to play it inside a new tab. This can be frustrating if you just want to download the MP3 or MP4 files to your hard disk. Good thing is that you can easily disable the in-built media player in Firefox and revert back to the older Firefox behavior. Here is how:

  1. Open Mozilla Firefox browser. In the location bar type about:config and press Enter.
  2. Firefox will show a warning. Click on the button labeled I’ll be careful I promise! to proceed.

    How to Disable In-built Media Player in Firefox

  3. In the Filter field type media.windows-media-foundation. You would see a preference named media.windows-media-foundation.enabled as shown.

    How to Disable In-built Media Player in Firefox

  4. Double click on media.windows-media-foundation.enabled to change its value to false.
  5. After changing the value, restart the browser for the changes to take effect.

After disabling the in-built media player for MP3 or MP4 files in Mozilla Firefox, when you click on MP3 or MP4 file links, it would open the usual file download window or start downloading it to your pre-selected download folder (as per your configuration settings of Firefox). You can also choose to open it directly in your preferred media player application like VLC Videolan Media Player, Windows Media Player or Nullsoft Winamp etc.

3 comments

  1. There is no media.windows-media-foundation.enabled file in the config list.
    What do I do now?

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