Plugin Essentials

Most plugins work out of the box. You can find more information at http://plugindoc.mozdev.org with great howtos for Windows, Mac and Linux. This page here only contains links to some plugins I personally find essential.

Mozilla automatically looks for existing plugins on your system and uses them automatically. The following settings are not necessary; however they can be "misused" to block Netscape from using the plugins, i.e. when you set user_pref("plugin.scan.Quicktime", "9.0"); Netscape will stop looking for Quicktime, since there simply is not version 9.0 of that program.
Java: user_pref("plugin.scan.SunJRE", "1.3");
Adobe Acrobat: user_pref("plugin.scan.Acrobat", "5.0");
Quicktime: user_pref("plugin.scan.Quicktime", "5.0");
Windows Media Player: user_pref("plugin.scan.WindowsMediaPlayer", "7.0");
Old Netscape 4 plugin folder: user_pref("plugin.scan.4xPluginFolder", true);

Installation of the following plugins

Either via clicking on "Install" or by unzipping/copying them into the Mozilla / Netscape 6/7 Plugin folder, e.g.
C:\Program Files\Netscape\plugins.

Netscape Live Audio 1.1.15.15
Live Audio can be used to play Multimedia files which are embedded into a web site using <embed>. It will playau, aif, aiff, wav, mid, midi, la, lma files.
Install
Attention: Newer versions such as Netscape 7.1 und 7.2 and all newee Mozilla versions can not use this plugin. Therefore use Beatnik instead (see below).

Shockwave Flash
for playing Macromedia flash animations.
Download & Install (external site)

Netscape NPAVI32 Dynamic Link Library
plays Microsoft AVI files.
Install
NOTE: Does not work with Mozilla 1.7 and higher!

Beatnik Player V2.0.5.2
Highly recommended player. Plays rmf, aif, aiff, au, wav, mid, midi files which come via <embed> or <object> in web sites
Note: patches.hsb must be copied into your Windows directoy, the rest of the files in your Netscape plugin directory.
Download

Windows Media Player
Use above user_pref.

Java
http://java.sun.com

RealOne Player
Will be found by Netscape automatically (or use above user_pref)

Quicktime 6
Used automatically.