New tool from Mozilla for updating plug-ins

Published: 2010-05-13. Last Updated: 2010-05-13 21:52:15 UTC
by Toby Kohlenberg (Version: 1)
4 comment(s)

It's been a relatively quiet day so I thought I'd mention this nice little tool that Mozilla has released:

https://www.mozilla.com/en-US/plugincheck/

It does exactly what it looks like - checks to see if your plugins are up to date and provides links to update them if they are not. It works with Firefox 3.6+, Opera 10.5, Safari 4, Chrome 4, or IE 8 and while they claim limited support for IE, it worked just fine when I tried it.

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4 comment(s)

Comments

That tool's been online a long while now, never been much use for detecting updates other than Flash (although that might be a fault with the plugin devs). For the equivalent for extensions, see Update Notifier: http://www.longfocus.com/firefox/updatenotifier/

Gabor

May 14th 2010
1 decade ago

The normal way of reaching the plugin check is via Tools->Add-ons, Plugins tab, click Find Updates.

Curiously, it seems to be giving me a "false positive" on needing to update my Adobe Acrobat plugin, even though I've just installed Reader, and the plugin shows as version 9.3.0.148.

As an non-expert, I've no idea whether I'm actually vulnerable or this is a bug in the plugincheck. Rather worrying, given the supposed prevalence of Acrobat exploits (and that my bank blocked attempted fraudulent withdrawals today).

Greg

May 14th 2010
1 decade ago

Looks like you got an old Acrobat installer - the plugin checker says version 9.3.2.163 on my systems.

Mike

May 14th 2010
1 decade ago

Curiously I get differing results when running under Firefox 3.6.3 and Safari 4.0.5 on Mac OSX 10.6.3.

Firefox indicates my QuickTime plug-in is out of date (7.6.3) while Safari says it's just fine (7.6.6).
Firefox shows the Java plugin version, while Safari indicates the version can not be determined.
Each browser shows varying degrees of detail on the version numbers of several plug-ins.
And finally, Safari shows a couple of plug-ins that Firefox doesn't see at all. I imagine that's the result of different installation directories for some doo-dads.

PaulJ

May 14th 2010
1 decade ago

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