We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we’re not alone.
~ Orson Welles.
If you ever check your task manager, you’ll notice Chrome is listening on port 5353 on Linux. That is not a random number: 5353 is the default port for mDNS, the multicast DNS protocol that lets devices discover each other on a local network. Chrome quietly runs a whole sub-process that listens there, doing device probing and auto discovery similar to what avahi does on a Linux desktop.
For most people this is harmless background noise, but on a network you care about, or a machine where you do not want extra services poking around, it is reasonable to ask: can I turn it off? Did you know you could stop it? Yes, you can, and it takes two small files.
🛠️ Disabling It
In order to disable this Chrome functionality you need to first create a directory and a policy file. You could do this by executing the commands below:
sudo mkdir -p /etc/opt/chrome/policies/managed/
sudo touch /etc/opt/chrome/policies/managed/block_mdns_ssdp.jsonWhat this does is first create a directory inside the /etc/opt/chrome which will be used to store managed policies, and create the initial policy file that we would be editing.
Then we edit the block_mdns_ssdp.json file that we created earlier and then we put the contents below:
{
"EnableMediaRouter": false
}This would specifically disable the media router and the probing of cloud printers utilized by Chrome. With that single flag, Chrome stops announcing itself on the local network and stops asking the network what else is out there.
NOTE: Don’t disable this functionality if you use cloud printers. The media router is exactly what Chrome uses to find and talk to those printers, so flipping this off will make them disappear from your print dialogs.
🧠 Final Thoughts
So to conclude, there are some hidden sub-processes and services Chrome is running under the hood to manage specific Chrome functionality. Most of them are useful, some of them are unnecessary for your setup, and the nice part is that the policy system lets you decide which is which without reinstalling anything.
So guys, what functionality or sub-process do you want to disable inside Chrome? Let me know and as always live life and hope you enjoyed this article!