The Mozilla Firefox development team has recently came with the idea of warning Firefox users about outdated, insecure or buggy plug-in. It was first implemented for Adobe flash plug in. It was created as a What’s New page and integrated in recent Firefox updates.
The scripts on the page check for installed plugins and compare the version of the installed plugin with the latest version that is offered officially by the developer of the plugin. Some supported plug-ins (among others) are Apple Quicktime, Shockwave Flash, Adobe Acrobat, Java, RealPlayer and Windows Media Player plugins. Furthermore the Mozila Firefox development team now extends the page to support all the popular browsers.
The service checks the browser plug-ins on Internet Explorer, Chrome, Opera, Safari and Firefox. This special page promises to check these plug-ins for you, and advise you of when it is time to update. Johnathan Nightingale, director of Firefox development, claimed that in the months since the page was deployed, it had seen over 60 per cent of Adobe Flash users with the most recent version, with the number growing to more than 75 per cent if the second most recent update is included.He said: “We believe that plug-in safety is an issue for the web as a whole, so while our initial efforts focused on building a page that would work for Firefox users, the team has since expanded plug-in check coverage to work with Safari 4, Chrome 4 and Opera 10.5.“We have added support for Internet Explorer 7 and 8 for the most popular plug-ins, as well, but since IE requires specific code to be written for each plug-in it will take us a little longer to get to full coverage.“This has been a phenomenal amount of work to develop and test, and the matrix of browser, plug-in and OS grows very quickly.”
Plugins are either rated as safe or potentially vulnerable (there might be a third rating for vulnerable plugins). An update button is displayed next to potentially vulnerable plugins which should lead to a download page to update the latest version of the plugin. Some plugins do not reveal their full version which means that they will be shown as potentially vulnerable even if the latest version is installed.
Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, said: “It’s great that Mozilla has extended its service to offer an additional security check for users of other browsers. Hopefully it will encourage more computer users to keep their systems patched, and make life more difficult for hackers.”
You can check your plugins here and you can find more on this project here.
References : scmagazineuk
