Changing the default applications the Mozilla Plugin Mozplugger uses

The mozilla family of browsers, e.g. firefox, use mozplugger as a generic plugin to call other external programs to handle files that the browser cannot process itself, e.g. PDF, movies etc.

The default mozplugger configuration has a list of applications to try for each file type and uses the first appropriate application available.

If you prefer to use a different application to the default one available then you can create a personal custom mozplugger configuration file as follows.

Firstly take a copy of the system default file with the command

cp /etc/mozplugger ~/.mozilla

To modify the default settings you now need to edit the file ~/.mozilla/mozplugger using a text editor such as emacs.

An example customization is to change the default PDF viewer used from acroread (which is very feature rich but very slow to run) to xpdf which is more lightweight. To do this you would find the line in the file that mentions acroread and either comment it out (put a # character at the beginning of the line) or move it below the xpdf line (in which case xpdf would be used provided it is installed but otherwise acroread would still be used).

Having made the changes restart firefox and test. If the change has had no effect you may need to remove the file ~/.mozilla/pluginreg.dat to clear any cached settings and then start firefox again.