Disable mDNS and SSDP Discovery in Google Chrome

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 to port 5353 on Linux. Did you know you could stop it? as what this sub-process is specifically doing – listening and doing some device probing like an auto discovery which is similar to avahi. In order to disable this Chrome functionality you need to first create a directory and policy file. You could do this by executing the command below.

sudo mkdir -p /etc/opt/chrome/policies/managed/
sudo touch /etc/opt/chrome/policies/managed/block_mdns_ssdp.json

What this does is first create a directory inside the /etc/opt/chrome which will be used to store manage 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 media router and probing of cloud printers utilized by Chrome.

NOTE: Don’t disable this functionality if you use cloud printers.

So to conclude there are some hidden sub process/services Chrome is running under the hood to manage specific Chrome functionality. So guys, what functionality or sub-process you want to disable inside Chrome? Let me know and as always live life and hope you enjoyed this article!