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. |
Konqueror has to know where your Netscape® plugins are installed. This can be in several places, i.e. 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.
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 section written by: Jost Schenck <jost@schenck.de>