&Netscape; Plugins
Introduction
As &Netscape;'s Navigator has been a
web browsing standard for many years, so-called &Netscape; plugins have
appeared that allow rich web content. Using those plugins, web sites
can contain PDF files, flash animations, video, &etc;
With &konqueror;, you can still use these plugins to take advantage of
rich web content.
&Netscape; plugins should not be confused with &konqueror;
plugins. The latter ones specifically extend &konqueror;'s
functionality; they are normally not used to display rich web
content.
Scan
&konqueror; has to know where your &Netscape; plugins are
installed. This can be in several places, &ie; you might have
system-wide plugins in /opt/netscape/plugins and your personal
plugins in $HOME/.netscape/plugins.
However, &konqueror; will not automatically use the installed plugins:
it first has to scan a list of folders. You can initiate the scan
by clicking Scan for new plugins. Alternatively,
you can enable Scan for new plugins at &kde; startup
so &konqueror; will scan the appropriate folders every time &kde;
starts up, to see whether new plugins have been installed.
Enabling Scan for new plugins at &kde;
startup can considerably slow down the startup procedure,
and is known to give difficulty on certain installations. Turn this
option off if you experience problems.
To find plugins, &konqueror; will look in the folders
specified in the Scan Folders frame. When you
use this control module for the first time, this list will already be
filled with reasonable paths that should work on most operating systems.
If you need to provide a new path, click the New
button; then you can either enter the new path in the text edit box to
the left, or choose a folder using the file dialog by clicking the
New... button. As scanning the folders can take
a little time, you might want to remove folders from the list where
you know that no plugins are installed: do this by selecting a folder
and clicking Remove. Using the
Up and Down buttons you
can change the order in which folders will be scanned by moving the
selected folder up or down.
As usual, click Apply to save your changes
permanently.
Plugins
In this tab, you can see a list of the &Netscape; plugins found by
&konqueror;, displayed as a tree. Double click on a plugin to fold it
out and you'll see that the different mime types this plugin can handle
will be displayed as branches. Fold out a mime type to see its
info.
This tab is mostly for informational purposes. The only
configurable option is Use artsdsp to pipe plugin sound
through aRts, which is enabled by default. Disable this if
you wish plugins to use their own method for sounds, and you have
configured &arts; in such a way that third-party applications can do
so (for example, by having it exit when idle, or by having it use a
custom sound device on modern soundcards which allow this.)
Section Author
This section written by: Jost Schenck
jost@schenck.de