intothefuzz

It’s always a really gratifying feeling to see a group of talented, dedicated Mozillians come together to solve a tricky challenge and help out the greater web in the process.

In this case, we knew that outdated plugins were causing security vulnerabilities and performance issues for a big chunk of our users. So, a group of people from the marketing, evangelism, web dev, QA, support and product teams got together and created a plugin checker to make detecting and updating old plugins significantly easier. Definitely check it out, and be sure to spread the word to your friends so they can stay safe, too.

This is step two in a larger project to address the various browsing problems caused by old plugins (step one was our outdated Flash warning from last month; future iterations will include baking this feature directly into Firefox and making the checker work for other browsers, too), so stay tuned for more information on the subject.

One of my favorite things about Mozilla is the genuine passion people have for making the web better. In this case, Laura Mesa (who did a great job of wrangling together a lot of difference pieces of the puzzle) has a list of the people who worked on the project…big kudos to all of them.

(Now pardon me while I go update my Silverlight and DivX plugins.)