Where is Firefox's plugins directory?

I know that there are extensive, "proper" methods for installing Firefox plugins. However, I would like to know where the folder is for linking shared-object (.so) files, such as libnpjp2.so and libflashplayer.so so that I can install plugins the "old-fashioned" way. In Firefox 21, I would have put it in ~/.mozilla/firefox/*[profile name].default/browser/plugins but that folder is no longer there. It keeps jumping around as Firefox changes. In about:plugins I still see all the plugins that I would have put there.

Can anyone tell me where the folder is? I already checked the folders in /usr/lib/firefox and /usr/lib/mozilla.

6 Answers

Please read the update at the end of this answer regarding changes in Firefox 52.

Acording to the Firefox developer documentation plugins live here:

• Directory pointed to by MOZ_PLUGIN_PATH environment variable
• ~/.mozilla/plugins
• /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins (on non-Ubuntu 64-bit systems, /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins might be used instead)
• Plug-ins within toolkit bundles
• [Profile directory]/plugins, where [Profile directory] is a user profile directory

Update for Firefox >=52

As of Firefox 52 support for NPAPI plugins has been dropped. All plugins living in one of the above directories are ignored, with the exception of Adobe Flash.

If you installed Flash with the flashplugin-installer package, it's loaded through a symlink in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins that ultimately links to /usr/lib/flashplugin-installer/libflashplayer.so.

6

I am on KDE 32bit 14.04 version. Firefox is already installed.

user Richard got negative reputation by telling us the correct path:

/usr/lib/firefox-addons/plugins

If you are proper linux user, it's no problem to move libflashplayer.so file to this directory as root user!

Youtube works after dat!

1

Users should place plugins in /usr/lib/firefox-addons/plugins as root.

4

I found there is a directory /usr/lib/firefox/brower/plugins/.

My Ubuntu version is 16.04 LTS. How to enable flash player in Mozilla Firefox in Ubuntu is a helpful article. If there is not a directory named lib64, just copy the correct file to /usr/lib/firefox/browser/plugins/. Based on my experience, it also works well.

As a new Ubuntu user, I've been suggested to use the path mentioned by the about:plugins firefox command. In my case, it's pointing to /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/.

Just mentioning here as I haven't seen this being mentioned. In case the approach isn't valid / reliable, I'd like to know why.

3

For flash player, using Ubuntu 16.04 64bit, /usr/lib/adobe-flashplugin/ is sufficient.

After downloading flash_player_npapi_linux.x86_64.tar.gz from Adobe website, I unpacked the archive and :

$ sudo cp libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/adobe-flashplugin/
$ sudo cp -r usr/* /usr

Restarted Firefox and done!

I can even see that /etc/alternatives/mozilla-flashplugin is a link to /usr/lib/adobe-flashplugin/libflashplayer.so

1