Is it possible to uninstall individual Firefox plugins?

Question

I have purposely installed two plugins into Firefox: Flash Player & Gecko-mediaplayer (I installed gecko-mediaplayer solely so I could get the Windows Media Player Plug-in). Every single other plugin listed in my Firefox plugins page is unused/unneeded. Several of the plugins list "Gecko Media Player" underneath them. Yet I installed gecko-mediaplayer only to get the "Windows Media Player Plug-in". Is it possible to uninstall all of the following plugins except for "Shockwave Flash" and "Windows Media Player Plug-in"? How do I do it?

Solution

Type about:plugins into the address bar. It will show you the filename of each plugin. You can find the name of the package that ships each plugin with: dpkg -S /path/to/plugin.so Then you can uninstall those packages using Synaptic.

For example, the Totem plugin is in the package totem-mozilla, and iTunes Application Detector is in rhythmbox-plugins. Note that some packages might ship more than one plugin - if you need one of them, you can't remove the others.

There is no way to uninstall plugins directly from Firefox.

Comments

[Chad--24216]

So an "individual plugin" comes from a package that could contain multiple plugins. The only way to remove the "individual plugin" is by removing the package it came from. But if this package also contained other plugins, removing the package would necessarily remove all other plugins in that package. So if I want just one "individual plugin" from a package I have to put up with having all the plugins that come in that package installed. Do I understand this correctly?

[Krzysztof Kosiński]

Yes, that's correct. You could manually delete the .so files from a root terminal, but I don't recommend this.