Loading ...Easy plugin management for Firefox 3
The latest Gran Paradiso nightly brings an important improvement to the Add-ons Manager. Along with themes and extensions, now it’s possible to see, enable and disable the installed plugins, those small applications that allow Firefox to show special content embedded in many web pages including Flash animations, video and audio in a variety of formats ( Real, DivX, Windows Media, QuickTime), Adobe PDF documents, Java applets, etc.
In Firefox 2 and previous versions there’s no easy way to determine what plugins and what versions are currently installed. To view present plugins a user could enter about:plugins in the location bar but the result is a very long and hard to read report. To disable a specific plugin, a user has to uninstall it or manually delete the related files, a task that could be hard to explain and followed by support people and end users respectively.
The ability to disable plugins also provides an easy way to work around security vulnerabilities that affect plugins.
An option not currently implemented is a way to check for updates for the installed plugins. A periodic check for new, more stable and safer versions and automated updates would be a big step forward security-wise.
Then there’s the problem with plugins that involve more than one file. For example, QuickTime is split into five library files, each of them to handle a different file types subset. The Plugins page lists the plugin as many times as there are files and there’s currently no way to tell which one is related to what. Java is another popular plugin in the same situation but Mozilla is already evaluating options to address these cases.
Source: Asa Dotzler’s blog.
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August 11th, 2007 at 3:45 am
Great improvement! Hope they fix the problem with multiple dlls.
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August 13th, 2007 at 6:48 am
Now this is something useful! Once implemented I can more easily help users when their Flash isn’t working. As said in the article, there’s no easy way to tell a use what to uninstall/remove when the user has no clue what is installed.
Super!
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August 14th, 2007 at 7:07 am
It would be nice if the interface included search engines as well.
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August 29th, 2007 at 7:23 pm
Wrote about this article in Difundefirefox.com
I hope we can inform the spanish community as well as you do.
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November 27th, 2007 at 10:17 pm
It would really be great to have the ability to keep a plugin turned on once it launches. I often times close a window where a plugin was launched, then I close that window only to find the next place I go to requires the plugin to be launched again (like acrobat reader)! We need to be able to choose to have a plugin stay on and not have to unload and load again all the time.
Are there any plans for this?
Is there a way to do this in firefox 2??
Thanks.
Cheers,
HTH
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December 24th, 2007 at 3:20 pm
I have very recently spent I don’t know how much time figuring out how to update and get notifications about updates of plug-ins, and now, to my great disappointment, I learn that Mozilla only managed to get the plug-ins into the “Extension” window, but not to offer easy (read “automatic”) updates. That is incremental, if I ever saw one.
Regards,
Hans Leander
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January 27th, 2008 at 2:32 am
java doesn’t works
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April 24th, 2008 at 11:55 am
It would be nice if the interface included search engines as well.
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April 24th, 2008 at 10:59 pm
WHERE can I go to download this?
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