Introduction
I have searched for available Firefox 2 and Opera 9 plugins for various popular MIME types listed in the task description. I have used Gentoo Linux distribution for testing. The results can be seen in the table below. If a plugin has any parameters, they are listed (or there is a link to them) in the Parameters column.
Results
Program (Plugin) |
MIME types |
Comments |
Parameters |
!OpenOffice.org Plug-in |
application/vnd.stardivision.calc |
This plug-in needs to be enabled in OOo (Tools->Options->Internet->Mozilla Plug-in->Enable) in order to work with Firefox. It works well with Firefox, although it doesn't work with Opera by default. I have found on the Internet that mozilla's plug-in could be copied to opera's plugin folder. I tried to do this, but the plug-in didn't work (operapluginwrapper: [plugin failed ] dlopen failed on /opt/opera/lib/opera/plugins/libnpsoplugin.so). |
- |
Mozplugger + Timidity |
audio/mid audio/x-midi audio/midi |
It seems that there is a problem with playing midi files on Linux as no major media player (mplayer, vlc, gxine...) supports this MIME type. There are no special plug-ins for playing midi files within browsers, too. I have found a workaround for Firefox. It is a bit tricky and doesn't seem to provide any functional controls. Opera needs mozplugger.so copying to it's plugin folder. |
- |
Adobe Acrobat Reader |
application/pdf |
This plug-in works fine with Firefox. However, it has a few issues with Opera. The user must click on the control window to activate it and until then only black window instead of document is shown. The actual document sometimes doesn't show up even after clicking on it several times. It finally shows up only after reloading the page. |
- |
Mozplugger + Evince |
application/postscript |
I could not find a dedicated plugin for Firefox/Opera, but I have found a workaround for Firefox (needs to be adjusted depending on an operating system). Opera needs mozplugger.so copying to it's plugin folder. It seems that Evince has it's own mozilla plugin, but it's not included with Evince and I could not find where to download it. |
- |
mplayerplug-in |
application/x-google-vlc-plugin |
It works well with Firefox and Opera. It supports almost every audio/video format. However, I could not find any list or description of OBJECT tag parameters. |
- |
VLC Plug-in |
audio/mpeg |
It works only with Firefox for me and in Opera it displays a black window instead of a embedded video. It seems to not work if there are several embedded videos on the same page: "(no video)" is displayed in a black background. This plugin doesn't provide any controls (even no play, pause, stop). |
autoplay (autostart), autoloop (loop), mrl (src, filename), mute, visible (showdisplay), volume |
Abiword, Koffice |
x-abiword |
I could not find any plug-in for Firefox or Opera that could handle Abiword or Koffice files. |
- |
image/x-tiff |
It needs to be manually compiled on non-deb systems. |
- |
|
Firefox/Opera (native support) |
image/svg+xml |
It is handled internally in Firefox/Opera. There's no need for a plug-in. |
- |
FreeWRL Plug-in |
model/vrml |
It works only in a full-screen mode (not embedded) for me. If I open an embedded VRML image, it just crashes the Firefox and displays an error message. It doesn't crach Opera though, but displays the same error message. The program works fluently in a stand-alone mode. |
- |
DjVuLibre Plug-in |
image/vnd.djvu |
Works perfectly with both browsers (and probably even more). |
Here are embedding instructions. |
- |
model/iges |
I could not find any plug-in that could open embedded files of these MIME types. |
- |
Conclusion
I have found Firefox/Opera plug-ins for the most popular MIME types (audio, video, image). However, there are almost no plug-ins or the existing ones are buggy for not so popular MIME types. Some plug-ins required manual compiling and copying, what is not very user-friendly. For some MIME types for which there are no dedicated plug-ins I have found workarounds using Mozplugger and a stand-alone program that can open the specified MIME types. Getting Mozplugger to work is not so easy like using a dedicated plug-in, so I hope there will be more plug-ins available for Linux browsers in the future.