Skip to Content

Submit your nominations for the Luxist Awards' Best in Decor
AOL Tech

plugin posts

Filed under: Microsoft, Mozilla, Browsers, Op-Ed

Dear Microsoft, please keep your lousy mitts off my Firefox install

This isn't the first time Microsoft has taken liberties with Firefox users. There's that whole .Net thing that happened back in May of this year.

So what gives, Redmond? Why - especially after the fallout from the last incident - would you go and push a Windows Presentation Foundation plugin on my Firefox install? I didn't ask for it, and I don't really want it. Plenty of people consider software that installs in this kind of underhanded way to be malware.

Not to mention a security risk. You know, the same way you (Microsoft) consider Google's Chrome Frame to be a security risk for your own browser. I'll need someone to explain to me how MS figures the situation is different when the shoe is on the other foot.

I'll clear something up for you right now - and this goes for all software companies, not just Microsoft. I expect control over what gets installed on my system and what doesn't. Go ahead and offer me updates, add-ons, and plugins. But please, give me the choice to install.

Heck, I can choose to put off Windows updates forever if I want and some of those are pretty critical patches. So why should I not be given the choice to opt out of something as trifling as a WPF plugin for my non-IE browser?

Get your filthy hands off my browser, you damn, dirty ape!

Filed under: Security, Adobe, Mozilla, Browsers

Firefox catches 50% with insecure Flash, only 30% click through to update


Two weeks ago Mozilla prepared a new landing page for Firefox updaters to check for outdated versions of the Adobe Flash Player plugin. When the page went live last week for some six million Firefox 3.5.3 and 3.0.14 users, Mozilla compiled some interesting -- and disconcerting -- statistics.

Just over 50% of users shown the page were found to be running an insecure Flash Player version. That's an alarming number, especially considering the number of times Flash vulnerabilities have been exploited in the past two years alone.

The bad news doesn't stop there. As it turns out, the warning only convinced about 30% of viewers to click through and immediately update the plugin.

When you consider the amount of time most people spend browsing and massive number of threats lurking on the Internet maintaining a secure, updated browser is imperative. That, of course, means keeping plugins like Flash and Java up to date and there's no time like the present to do it.

Hopefully Mozilla's next push will meet with more success.

Filed under: Internet, Web services, Microsoft, Freeware

Silverlight 3 now available for your Flash-killing pleasure


Way back in 2007 I scoffed at a little thing from Microsoft called Silverlight. Well, I'm not laughing any more. Now at 3.0, Silverlight's feature set is growing fast. Apparently MS released the new version a little early, so go here to download it and give it a test drive.

There are significant updates under the hood with major ramifications. First, Silverlight has always been adept at handling streaming video. But Smooth Streaming, which debuted at E3, allows you to watch HD video instantly. As Neowin points out, there's a terrific demo here. Silverlight also now supports H.264, AAC and MPEG-4 codecs, which is exceptionally handy for people encoding for a wide variety of platforms.

There's a lot of enhancements that Flash was late to the party on, including SEO improvements (long the bane of such dynamic plug-in media), and multi-touch support. Coupled with some server side enhancements (Ars has a good round up here), this makes Silverlight an easier sell for webheads concerned with search and data-centric sites.

Perhaps the most tantalizing bit are the "out of browser" experiences promised by the 3.0 update. This is a direct shot at Adobe's AIR efforts, and is lovingly detailed here.

Naturally Silverlight works on PC's running Windows and Macs (Intel and PPC, although version 2 and 3 only support Intel). Sorry Linux, still no love there.

Filed under: Windows, Mozilla, Open Source, Browsers, Windows x64

New Tab King for Firefox offers a clever alternative - with boss mode!


Your new tab page is obviously a pretty important part of the Firefox experience. Both Mozilla and Google have pretty slick options you can plug in, but you may not have heard of New Tab King yet.

Like other options, NTK taps into your recent usage to display frequently visited sites and recently closed tabs. You can toggle the display of your used sites to include either all browsing or only sites that are in your bookmarks. There's also a list of Windows shortcuts included for quick access to your My Documents folder, Notepad, Calculator, and Windows Media Player. You can also specify a custom background image.

And let's not forget about the boss mode button! Click it, and New Tab King automatically switches to a pre-defined display which includes sites like Harvard Business Publishing, Wall Street Journal, NASA, and the BBC ticker.

No, it won't destroy all traces of any questionable browsing you've been doing, but with boss mode on you can at least quickly shield your other tabs from prying eyes with control + t.

Edit: as noted by our commenters, this one is Windows only. The Firefox addon does state that, and while this post is tagged "windows" I didn't state that directly.

Filed under: Internet, Utilities, Macintosh, Productivity, Adobe, Commercial, Freeware, Browser Tips, Imaging Tips

PDF Browser Plugin for Mac browsers

PDF Browser PluginThe Mac's built-in PDF support is pretty strong, which is nice because if there's one piece of software I have always despised for its unnecessary bloat, it would be Adobe Reader. To be honest, I've always liked the fact that when I come across a PDF online, clicking to open it results in it being downloaded and opened in the built-in Preview application. Opening PDFs in the browser was always slow and clunky using Adobe Reader, and always annoyed me.

But recently a friend convinced me to try Schubert|it PDF Browser Plugin, and I'm glad I did. PDF Browser Plugin does exactly what you'd expect, allowing you to view PDF files in the comfort of your favorite browser (provided your favorite browser is either Firefox or Safari). But what I found surprising was how fast PDF Browser Plugin is. If you happen to be viewing a small PDF, it will open almost instantly, with the only delay being how long it takes to download the actual PDF file. This speed is possible because PDF Browser Plugin is leveraging the Quartz technology built into the Mac that allows it to render PDF files in the same way the Finder or Preview does.

The plugin's other claim to fame is a distinct respect for the Mac's look-and-feel. Schubert|it PDF Browser Plugin is free for personal or educational use, but requires a $69 site license for business users.

Filed under: Fun, Utilities

Add-Art is an ad blocker and an art show in one

Of all the unlikely places to curate an art show, the ad space on websites has to be one of the most unlikely. Instead of shocking a monkey or being invited to meet some "adult friends," how about looking at a selection of art that changes every two weeks? The Add-Art plugin for Firefox comes packaged with Adblock Plus, but instead of removing the ads entirely, it displays images from the current show.

Replacing ads with art sounded a bit hokey to me at first, but its the curation that makes this idea brilliant. There's something uplifting about a campaign to take a space in a website's layout, that people were just going to throw away with ad-blockers anyway, and repurpose it to show them something new. Looking through the past exhibits, one of the more interesting projects was curated by having Amazon Mechanical Turk workers select their favorites: a clever, populist approach to art, made possible by the web.

[via Andrew Richardson on Twitter]

Filed under: Web services, Open Source, Social Software, Browsers

MySpace, Flock and Vidoop release OpenID for Flock plugin

OpenID is a really great concept. The ability to use a single digital identity across the web and avoid having to sign up for yet another user account is a real productivity boon. More and more high profile sites and services are adopting OpenID, but the project still hasn't gained the traction that many of us think it deserves. This is partially because it still isn't easy to use OpenID -- or even find out if a site supports OpenID -- on all services. MySpace, Flock and Vidoop think they've come across a solution: let the browser handle it.

Back in June, MySpace announced support for OpenID and also became an OpenID provider. In order to help users more easily manage their online identity across other sites and services, MySpace teamed up with Flock and Vidoop to create OpenID for Flock, available today at https://extensions.flock.com. OpenID for Flock is an open source plugin, part of the larger Identity in the Browser (IDIB) project which is focused on having the browser, not the user handle, authenticate and mange multiple user identities.

I had the chance to demo the plugin yesterday and it is pretty cool. Essentially, once installed an OpenID icon appears on the right of Flock's chrome bar. The extension scans a page for OpenID compatibility, and if a site supports OpenID, the icon starts to glow. You can then automatically choose to populate the OpenID fields with your designated OpenID URL or associate that site with a specific OpenID account. You can manage all of your OpenIDs, choose what sites to associate certain profiles with and view the login history and OpenID-to-site-relationship with each site.


Read more →

Filed under: Internet, Mozilla, Social Software, Beta

Mozilla brings Twitter, RSS, other messages to Firefox with Snowl

Snowl
Mozilla released a plugin for Firefox called Snowl yesterday that has the potential to completely change the way you use your web browser. Or it could just frustrate the heck out of you. Here's what it does: it brings messages from various sources (Twitter, RSS feeds, and eventually instant messaging services) to your browser.

The concept is interesting. Why rely on pop up notifications to let you know that you need to switch browser tabs or applications to keep up with conversations on Twitter, FriendFeed, or other locations when you can just see everything on one screen? Snowl lets you browse the web while keeping an eye on all of those conversations.

But the truth of the matter is it just sort of makes a browser screen look crowded. If you've got a 24 inch display, that might not matter. But if you've got a 15 inch, 1024 x 768 display, this is not the plugin for you. Snowl does present a few interesting ways of looking at your messages. There's an Outlook-style 3-pane view with contacts and sources on the left, headlines at the top and full text in the bottom. Or you can use a "river of news" style view that shows a newspaper-like list of updates.

Snowl is still in the early beta stages. Mozilla admits that there are a ton of known bugs, but the developers wanted to see if there was any real interest in the project before continuing. Thus the public release. What do you think? Is Snowl useful or just another distraction?

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Freeware

DM2: Window Management Wizardry


The Windows Explorer shell is great and all, but I've written before about some of it limitations and omissions - and offered up some downloads that help patch the holes. DM2 is yet another solid choice: it's free, tiny, portable and it's got a ton of useful tricks up its sleeve.

DM2 looks like any other shell enhancer at first, offering all the expected tweaks: it'll minimize apps to the system tray or to floating icons, hide, align, and change opacity of windows, and roll up windows to the title bar. With DM2, however, that's just the beginning.

Minimize, restore, and maximize just aren't enough options, so DM2 amps them up by letting you add right-click and control, alt, and shift click actions to them via the app's control center. For example, I've set right click on the minimize button to roll up, right click close to send to tray, and shift + right click close hides my window. But wait, it gets better.

Read more →

Filed under: Utilities, Productivity, Troubleshooting, Browsers

Inline PDF viewing for Firefox 3? There's a plugin for that



If you've recently switched to Firefox for Mac, you're probably getting used to hearing all your problems answered with "there's a plugin for that." Well, here's one more problem plugins can solve: inline PDF viewing. Safari does it automatically, and you might be missing it if you've switched recently.

You could always download the PDFs and open them with the notoriously slow Acrobat Reader or a faster 3rd-party app, but if you want them to open right in your browser, just grab this plugin. No frills here, the description on Google Code simply says it, "uses PDFKit to display PDFs in the browser." We tested it out on some huge PDF magazines, and it handles them just as well as Safari can.

[via Daring Fireball]

Filed under: Photo, Macintosh, Commercial

Hydra 1.5.3 (beta) for Aperture

Attempting to capture the different ranges you see with your eyes on camera is quite difficult. For the most part, digital cameras attempt to accurately capture an image but sometimes details are lost in the shadows or in the highlights. In high dynamic range (HDR) photography multiple photographs of varying exposures are taken of the same subject and later combined to produce a photo with a greater dynamic range than if only 1 photo was taken.

There are many ways to go about creating an HDR image and if you're an Aperture user, the folks at Creaceed may have a solution for you with their Hydra 1.5.3 plug-in. While currently wearing the beta badge, Hydra allows Aperture users to select up to 4 photos to create their HDR image and also offers the option to auto align your selected images, allowing you to take photos without the use of a tripod. This is an important feature, as when you are overlaying multiple photos it's important that they all line up perfectly. Controls are well laid out and results are fast and impressive.

While producing a quality HDR image is more than just having the right software, Hydra attempts to ease the post production work allowing you to concentrate on the most important part... what's happening through the lens.

Filed under: Fun, Internet, Security, Mozilla, Freeware, Browser Tips, web 2.0

Firefox add-on stops accidental MySpace encounters: it's actually useful!

amionmyspace.com?
Have you ever accidentally visited MySpace? Yeah, we probably have too, though, it was never a noticeable problem. In fact, we can't even remember it happening, but it seems like it has to have happened... right?

Well, this Firefox add-on promises to detect MySpace in Firefox, and provide a pop-up menu to stop unsuspecting web-browsers from hitting up the social network. The plug-in is obviously a joke, but we found a great use for it anyway -- avoiding phishing.

It's called AmIOnMySpace.com? and it can be used to detect the real MySpace site. If for any reason the message doesn't pop-up upon first visiting the social network, you're not on the real site. The biggest problem with using this as a way of avoiding phishing sites is that it doesn't alert users when leaving MySpace, so it's still possible to get attacked from within.

[via Digg]

Filed under: Internet, Web services

PayPal browser plugin: Buy stuff on sites that don't take PayPal

PayPal browser plugin
PayPal provides a quick and easy way to pay for goods on eBay, Half.com, or other sites that accept the service. But what if you want to buy something from a store that doesn't accept PayPal, but don't feel like giving up your credit card information? Last year PayPal launched a service that lets you create a single-use credit card number that is linked to your PayPal account. And the company has also launched a plugin that gives you easy access to the the Secure Card service in your web browser.

You can install the PayPal plugin by logging into your PayPal account and select PayPal Plug-in from the menu on the left. You'll be prompted to download a 5MB file which will install the plugin for both Internet Explorer and Firefox. Note that the plugin is Windows only, and does not seem to play well with Firefox 3 yet.

Once installed, a window should pop up whenever you visit a site asking for your credit card information. You can also generate a card manually through a drop down menu.

If you're using Mac, Linux, or Firefox 3, you can still use the secure card feature by logging into your PayPal account and generating a card number. But the browser plugin makes the process much easier.

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Mozilla

Mozilla - They're UnbeWeaveable

Mozilla Weave
If you've ever tried to sync up multiple copies of Firefox over multiple computers, we feel your pain. The Google sync plugin hasn't been updated since 2006 and didn't even work with the latest release of Firefox. Ugh.

Have no fear, Mozilla Weave is here!

With Mozilla Weave you can sync all of your bookmarks, history, cookies, saved form data, and now passwords (for the first time!) with any computer with Firefox on it.

You can get the official Mozilla Weave plug-in here: https://services.mozilla.com/

Do you have multiple computers running Firefox (or any other browser) and use another plug-in or service to stay synced up? Let us know in the comments!


[via fans of tech]

Filed under: Internet, Utilities, Browser Tips

Preview the contents of ZIP files before downloading with Archview for Firefox

Archview

Don't want to download a massive ZIP or RAR file just so you can extract one tiny file contained in the archive? ArchView is a Firefox add-on that will let you preview the contents of ZIP and RAR files posted online before you download them. And you can even download individual files from within the archive.

Archview hangs out in your status bar where you can click on it to enable or disable the plugin or change its settings. Future versions will add support for additional archive formats including ISO and 7z. Archview supports Firefox 2 and Firefox 3, but the version available at the official Firefox add-ons page claims that it isn't compatible with Firefox 3 beta 5 r Firefox 3 RC1. This isn't true, but you'll have to install the plugin from the developer's page if you're using anything newer than Firefox 3 beta 4.

[via gHacks]

Featured Time Waster

Graveyard Shift - zombie-busting Time Waster

With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet. They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...

View more Time Wasters

Featured Galleries

Defective by Design, London: Protest Pictures
Microsoft Security Essentials
Chromium Pre-Alpha on CrunchBang Linux
Safari 4 Beta
10 Firefox themes that don't suck
IE8 RC1
Download Squad at the Crunchies After-Party
Download Squad at the Crunchies
WordPress 2.7
Cooking Mama: Mama Kills Animals
Windows 7 Hands On
Comodo Internet Security
Android First-look: Amazon.com MP3 Store
Android First-look: Twitroid
Google Reader Android
Android Hands-On
Twine 1.0
Photoshop Express Beta
Mozilla Birthday Cake
Palm stuff
Adobe Lightroom 1.1

 


Follow us on Twitter!

Flickr Pool

www.flickr.com

More Tech Coverage

AOL Radio