Mozilla Plugin Check Now Live
10.13.09 - 07:35pm
A little over a month ago, I talked about a project we had started to inform users when their plugins were out of date. This is a really important project for us, because old versions of plugins can cause crashes and other stability problems, and can also be a major security risk. In the first phase, we focused on the popular Adobe Flash Player plugin, and we were thrilled to see more than 10 million Firefox users click through to Adobe’s download page to get themselves updated in the first week.
Today, we’re bringing the rest of the story. Our web team has just pushed the full plugin check page live, checking the status of more than 15 popular plugins, with more still in the works. Visitors to the page can see which plugins they have installed and, for any that are outdated, follow an easy link to the update site.
In the upcoming release of Firefox 3.6, we’ll also include built-in support for helping users keep up to date. When you visit a page with Firefox 3.6, we’ll use this same service to let you know if any of the plugins used on the site have updates available.
We’ve got a pretty strong list of plugins and versions already but we’ll continue to maintain and grow it based on our conversations with plugin authors and our users. If you want more information, or are interested in helping out, check out the web team’s post. Did the plugin check uncover any surprises for you?
Johnathan Nightingale
Human Shield
Nice work on landing a user friendly tool!
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
So, why did Firefox 3.5.3 just now pop up a dialog box notifying me that it had gone ahead and disabled the Windows Presentation Foundation plugin? I did not visit the plugin check page; I did not apply any Windows Updates; I did not apply any Firefox updates.
When and how did my Firefox install learn that the WPF plugin was undesirable?