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Firefox thinks *.rpm means RealPlayer file!
I recently upgraded to Firefox 1.0 and decided to clean out my
old plugins and start from scratch, getting the latest of everything.
I have plugger, and it appears to call out to RealPlayer 8 (realplay)
to play, for example, amazon.com song snippets. The problem is that
every time I click on a file with an rpm extension, (like Redhat
Package Manager files), Firefox thinks it is a Realplayer Plugin Metafile
and fires up realplay, which promptly barfs. I never used to have this
problem. I used to be able to play the amazon song samples and
download RPMs. How can I fix this?
This begs a larger question. I need a document that describes, from
35,000 feet, how plugins work and what they are, especially with
regard to Firefox. The FAQs and such I have seen dive right into too
much detail for what I'm after. I assume from my experience described
above that plugins key off of filename extension to determine type,
at least some of the time? How are MIME types (e.g. "x-pn-realaudio")
embedded in files on web sites, and does this override the filename
extension? It looks like plgins are .so files, and plugger dispatches
out to help applications somehow. How is the information embedded
within a plugin .so file as to which file types that plugin can
handle? If two plugins both claim to handle the same file type,
which one gets it? I once convinced myself that it decided on the
basis of file modification date (!) but I'm not so sure any more.
In addition to a nice, user-friendly document about plugins,
Are there any nice tools for managing any of this? Sure I can
touch the .so files, and I can hand edit plugger's config file,
but is this the way the nice folks at mozilla.org intend Joe Average
to juggle all this?
Thanks.
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