iCab Plug-ins

Like most other browsers, iCab supports plug-ins that are able to handle various file formats (e.g. !PDF documents) and media content (e.g. QuickTime video and Flash animation) that iCab doesn't support by itself. Most of the time, plug-ins have something to do with interactive or multimedia content.

Examples include the QuickTime plug-in for viewing movies or the Acrobat/PDF plug-in for displaying PDF files, directly within the browser. The Java plug-in and the Flash plug-in both provide access to various interactive content. Most Macintosh users have at least those four plug-ins installed.

Unfortunately, not all plug-ins work well in iCab; some even do not work at all. This page tries to provide some general tips regarding the installation, configuration and use of plug-ins. The seperate BrowserPluginList is a list of several common browser plug-ins with notes about their compatibility with iCab.

Table of Contents

iCab Plug-ins on Mac OS X

It is usually sufficient to follow the installation instructions that accompany the downloaded plug-in. The following section attempts to provide help with unusual installation procedures and with uninstalling plug-ins.

Just like most other plug-ins and system extensions, Mac OS X has several locations to install Internet plug-ins in. All of them are folders named Internet Plug-Ins inside your Library folders. In theory, you could simply create an Internet Plug-Ins folder in any of your Library folders, drop your plug-ins into it, and be done with it, but in real life you only need to know about the following two locations:

• /Library/Internet Plug-Ins is inside the system-wide Library folder. Modifiying it requires an administrator password, but plug-ins in here have the benefit of being available for all users on your machine.
• ~/Library/Internet Plug-Ins is inside your home folder (e. g. /Users/johndoe/Library/Internet Plug-Ins -- the tilde (~) always denotes your home folder in Mac OS X). Plug-ins in this folder are only available for your user account; for example, this means that your spouse working on the same machine but with a different account would need to install the plug-in for herself as well. The advantage is that you don't need an administrator password to modify this folder.

If you don't have multiple user accounts on your Mac, it doesn't matter which Internet Plug-Ins folder your plug-ins are in.

To uninstall a plug-in under Mac OS X, simply remove the associated files as noted on the BrowserPluginList from all of your Internet Plug-Ins folders (including, but not necessarily limited to, ~/Library/Internet Plug-Ins in your home folder and /Library/Internet Plug-Ins).

Installing RealPlayer 10 for Mac OS X

After downloading the RealPlayer from http://www.real.com/, mount the .dmg by double-clicking it and (important) copy the RealPlayer application to your Applications folder (or anywhere else on your local hard drive). Now you merely need to open the RealPlayer application by double-clicking it; The plug-in should be installed automatically.

Note that the files the RealPlayer puts into /Library/Internet Plug-Ins are just aliases to the actual plug-ins stored inside the RealPlayer.app package. You need to either keep the Player on your HD or replace the aliases by their targets.

iCab Plug-ins on System 7 to Mac OS 9

Plug-ins can either be installed in the System Folder's Internet Plug-Ins folder or in a Plug-ins folder in the same folder the iCab application is installed in. The former location is preferred, but only works with Mac OS 8.6 and later.

Many plug-in installers won't install the plug-in into any of these locations, but only in other browsers' own plug-ins folders; generally these installers only recognise mainstream browsers such as Opera and Internet Explorer. If you do have another such browser installed, you can first install the plug-in for a browser it recognises. If you have Opera installed, install the plugin for Opera as well as any other browsers you use regularly as this makes it immediately available to iCab (once you have reloaded iCab); the following steps do not then apply.

Otherwise, you have two options. If you have another browser that the plugin installer recognises, install the plugin for tat first. Then, you have to make the plug-in available to iCab; this is a several-step process. Firstly, locate where the plug-in files were placed. You should have been toldr, or selected, what browser they were installed for (e.g. Internet Explorer) thus they will be in that application's plug-ins folder (inside the folder containing the application program). Otherwise, use Finder search (or Sherlock) to search for the filenames listed in the BrowserPluginList). Then, make them available to iCab. The best way is probably to copy them to the Internet Plug-Ins folder inside your System Folder, if you have Mac OS 8.6 or higher. For earlier versions of Mac OS, you can put aliases of the files into iCab's own "Plug-ins" folder (found in the same folder as the iCab application program; create this folder if it is missing). Or, you can replace iCab's Plug-ins folder with an alias (called "Plug-ins") to the one of whichever browser has all the plugins, and iCab will share that program's plugins folder.

Some people do not have on their computer any browser that the installer will recognise. Instead of having to waste time and effort downloading another browser, install Unopera: http://telcontar.net/Misc/Unopera/. This is a 2 k file that pretends to be Opera, and plug-in installers should believe that you have Opera installed. Install the plug-in for Opera and it will be automatically available for iCab.

Uninstalling plug-ins

To uninstall a plug-in under all classic versions of the Mac OS (including Mac OS X's Classic), simply remove the associated files as listed in the BrowserPluginList from both the System Folder's Internet Plug-Ins folder and the Plug-ins folder in the same folder the iCab application is installed in. (Maybe one or both of these folders don't exist.)

Plug-in Configuration

Unlike most other browsers, iCab provides a very detailed graphical user interface to browser plug-in configuration, allowing you to enable or disable specific plug-ins and/or specific file formats in its plug-in preferences.

For example, iCab has its own PNG image decoder built-in, which is better than Apple's PNG decoder in QuickTime. Nevertheless the plug-in setup sometimes default to use the QuickTime plug-in to display PNG images in iCab; this is both slow and looks ugly. To change this behaviour, go to iCab -> Preferences... -> Plug-ins and uncheck the formats image/png and image/x-png in the QuickTime section.

Additional Information

A complete list of all your installed plug-ins is also shown when you visit about:plugins in iCab.