Firefox Plugins

Java
Mplayer
Using Linux Plugins
Flash
Acrobat Reader
Search Engines
Extensions

First you'll need to install java.

Now make a link for firefox so it can know to use the java plugin we just installed.

ln -s /usr/local/jdk1.4.2/jre/plugin/i386/ns610/libjavaplugin_oji.so /usr/X11R6/lib/browser_plugins/

Afterwards open up firefox (if it was open you'll probably have to restart it) and you can type about:plugins in the address bar and you can verify that it was installed correctly.

The mplayer plugin will allows us to play embedded video in firefox.

vi /etc/make.conf

Add this line:

WITH_MOZILLA=firefox

Now we can continue to install the plugin.

cd /usr/ports/www/mplayer-plugin
make install clean

The same drill as before, you'll have to restart firefox to reap the benefits. It will also show up the same way in your plugins.

There are a number of commercial apps/browser plugins available for Linux. In order to use these browser plugins with the FreeBSD-native version of Firefox (highly recommended due to the ugly font rendering on the linux-firefox version), we have to install an amazing little app: nspluginwrapper:

cd /usr/ports/www/nspluginwrapper
make install clean

Pay attention to the pkg-message. (/usr/ports/www/nspluginwrapper/pkg-message). It gives instructions for detecting/installing Linux Netscape plugins. (Most Linux browser plugins are Netscape plugins).

Before you can install any Linux browser plugins, you'll need to enable Linux Binary Compatibility Mode on your system. We have instructions here for doing so.

Once you've installed some Linux browser plugins (i.e. Flash, Acrobat Reader, etc.) on your system, you can detect and install them for Firefox (and other native browsers) by typing the following command:

nspluginwrapper -v -a -i

I tested this, and nspluginwrapper automatically detected and installed the Flash, Acrobat Reader, and RealPlayer plugins for use with Firefox. (RealPlayer is not mentioned further on this page because I was unable to successfully play a .rm file from within Firefox).

Flash is pretty common on the Internet, and some websites are not even navigable without Flash. You've probably seen an ugly white box with a green puzzle-piece and a message telling you additional plugins must be installed in order to view the media on the page when you visit certain websites. Clicking "Install Missing Plugins" in Firefox gives you an error message that no suitable plugin was found. Fortunately, as of FreeBSD 7.1 you no longer have to worry about that:

cd /usr/ports/www/linux-flashplugin9
make install clean

Make sure you install nspluginwrapper, then run the following command to add Flash to your browser plugins:

nspluginwrapper -v -a -i

Restart Firefox, and if you type about:plugins in the address bar you should see Shockwave Flash listed among your plugins! Seems to work well with MySpace, and that includes sound. The same can be said for YouTube!, with sound once again working beautifully.

You can use Acrobat Reader as a standalone PDF-viewer and as a browser plugin (which allows you to view PDF files in Firefox rather than forcing you to download them manually, then launch a PDF-viewer and open the PDF files). Let's get it:

cd /usr/ports/print/acroread7
make install clean

You'll need to install nspluginwrapper if you want to use the browser plugin, then run the following command:

nspluginwrapper -v -a -i

Restart Firefox, and the next time you click on a link to a PDF file, it should open inside of Firefox rather than prompting you to download it. (You can always still download the PDF by right-clicking the link and choosing "Save Link As.")

The google bar is a very useful feature in Firefox. I (Dan) give Kevin a hard time for going to www.google.com rather than using the search bar. It's a little bit more work that it should be to customize it working in FreeBSD, but it's still not that bad. You will need to do this entire section as root. First start up firefox (as root, even though this is never the way you should be browsing, you'll be forgiven as it is now necessary).

Now go to http://mycroft.mozdev.org/download.html. Search for whatever you want. I'll go through this example with Freshports, a wonderful resource you should be using. Now run the search and click on the result for freshports. When you click on the link to install you'll get a nice little popup. Pay attention to the source URL. Now type that into your address bar (new tab of course). For freshports you should've gotten http://mycroft.mozdev.org/plugins/freshports.src. Now you should download the corresponding .png file at http://mycroft.mozdev.org/plugins/freshports.png. You'll want to save both of those files to put them both in /usr/X11R6/lib/firefox/searchplugins but if you're like me you won't have permissions to save to those folders with firefox, so you'll need to save them somewhere else and then mv them. If you saved them to /big for instance.

mv /big/freshports.* /usr/X11R6/lib/firefox/searchplugins/

Now that you've saved those two files, click on the add link again, and say OK. You should now have that added to your search engines. If you want to verify you can open firefox with your user, or you can just trust me. As long as you are customizing the search, I will note that by deleting the .src and .png in /usr/X11R6/lib/firefox/searchplugins/ for any of the search engines you can remove it from your search bar. It cleans things up nicely.

As you're probably aware, firefox is customizable with numerous extensions. We just wanted to point out a few of our favorites:

Adblock
Adblock Filterset.G Updater
Download Manager Tweak
CustomizeGoogle

Adblock and the filterset.G updater are both essential. The two should always be used in conjunction. Download Manager Tweak will allow you to open up your downloads in a new tab rather than annoying popup window. Finally CustomizeGoogle allows you to do many nice things with Google.

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