# &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 dialogue 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

Conversion to British English: Malcolm Hunter malcolm.hunter@gmx.co.uk