Your browser uses utilities called plug-ins to handle special file types, play media and generally add functionality and fun to your web browsing experience. However these plug-ins can be a vector for your computer to be attacked by malware on the web. Your best defense is to update your software regularly, so that well-known vulnerabilities are fixed on your system before the bad guys get there. But most people don’t think about their plug-ins often, and many probably don’t remember that they have plug-ins.
The good folks at Mozilla have published a page to help check your plug-ins to see if they are out-of-date. It works for all browsers, not just Firefox. It works on Safari. However, it is still in development. They haven’t gotten all plug-in makers to cooperate in providing version data yet, so it can’t identify the latest version of all plug-ins yet, but it works okay for the major ones, and will at least remind you that you have the rest installed.
If you don’t know why you have a particular plug-in installed, maybe you should get rid of it.
Next, here’s a cool tip for Firefox users. Sorry, but this one doesn’t work on Safari, but it does work on Firefox on Mac OS and Windows. You probably know you have a “home page”, that automatically loads when you start Firefox. But, Firefox is a tabbed browser, and you can have multiple tabs open at once. How can you make Firefox start with several tabs, with a page of your choice in each tab? Say I always want to start Firefox with the Apple home page in one tab, and the MacMAD home page in another tab. In the General tab of Firefox Preferences, for the Home page, enter:
http://www.apple.com/ | http://www.macmad.org
That’s the vertical bar character between the two URLs. Now, Firefox will open these two tabs whenever it starts up. Or, you can navigate to the tabs and page you want, and then select Use Current Pages on the preferences pane, and Firefox will fill in the URLs for you.
-Jamie
