Plug-ins, Add-ons and Extensions: Uses and Details

In today’s internet and browsers based world, everybody heard about plugins and everybody uses it also. But, how many of us knows what a plug-in really is and how does it work?

For us whenever we want to run a flash player, we install the missing flash player plug-in as advised by the website. Or whenever we want to watch read a pdf file online or for some other things we normally install plug-ins. I have written about some useful plugins in my earlier posts also. So the question remains, what is a plug-in?

As given in Wikipedia“In computing, a plug-in (or plugin) is a set of software components that adds specific abilities to a larger software application. If supported, plug-ins enable customizing the functionality of an application. For example, plug-ins are commonly used in web browsers to play video, scan for viruses, and display new file types. Well-known plug-ins examples include Adobe Flash Player, QuickTime, and Java Applets.

Add-on (or addon) in computing is often considered the general term comprising snap-ins, plug-ins, extensions, and themes for software applications.”

In simple term think, you have first installed the Mozilla Firefox. Now your browser has the capability to download web pages, render them and show the content to you. However the flash video which need adobe flash player, can’t run on your browser, as Mozilla does not understand the code and application of Adobe directly.

So Mozilla has given some platform on which adobe can make a small supporting software known as plugin. Now when you install the adobe flash player plugin, your browser gets the capability to understand how to run the flash videos.

Similarly for others softwares also the browser needs the plugins given by third party to run that software. Some examples of such plugins are:  Adobe Flash Player, Adobe Reader, Java, Windows Media Player, Real Player, QuickTime, Microsoft Silverlight etc.

Now so whenever you need some specific software to run in your browser you need to install those plugins so that your browser can understand how to run that softwares inside it.

You may have to careful while downloading and installing plugins, as some plugins may not be required but unnecessarily consumes your RAM memory and make your system slow. It may cause your system or browser to crash also.

For each browser there are different plugins available from different vendors. Like for flash player or for in built dictionary, you have to install separate plugin in your browser.

 Some useful plugins:

For chrome users they can find the necessary plugins from chrome support website, or the same plugins and their rating can be get from Chrome web store.

For Firefox users the recommend plugin check and download can be available from Firefox check yourplugin website. 

Otherwise you can directly search for a specific plugin/add on in Google for a specific browser, then you will be automatically get the best website from the same.

Difference between plugins, add-ons and extension:

 Add-ons are installable enhancements to the Mozilla Foundation's projects (and compatible variants such as Portable Firefox). Add-ons allow the user to add or augment application features, use themes to his or her liking, and handle new types of content.

Extensions can be used to modify the behaviour of existing features to the application or add entirely new features. Extensions are especially popular with Firefox, because Mozilla developers intend for the browser to be a fairly minimalistic application in order to reduce software bloat and bugs, while retaining a high degree of extensibility, so that individual users can add the features that they prefer.

Plugins are compiled, loadable modules, originally descended from NPAPI; they can live outside of the browser's process space (which leads to all kinds of fun interoperability issues and vulnerabilities).

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