Jost
Schenck
2001-07-24
2.2000
KDE
KControl
Netscape
plugins

# &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 directories. You can initiate the scan by clicking Scan for new plugins. Or you can enable Scan for new plugins at KDE startup so &konqueror; will on every &kde; startup scan the appropriate directories to see whether new plugins have been installed.

Enabling Scan for new plugins at KDE startup can considerably slow down the startup procedure.

To find plugins, &konqueror; will look in the directories specified in the Scan Directories 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 directory using the file dialog by clicking the ... button. As scanning the directories can take a little time, you might want to remove directories from the list where you know that no plugins are installed: do this by selecting a directory and clicking Remove. Using the Up and Down buttons you can change the order in which directories will be scanned by moving the selected directory 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.

## Section Author

This section written by: Jost Schenck jost@schenck.de