Check and Remove Plugins in Firefox

The terminology used by the Mozilla team is sometimes a little bit confusing. Could you for instance define the differences between add-ons, extensions and plugins ? The first two and the latter are different which is easy to explain. Plugins are installed by third-party applications while add-ons and extensions are installed by the user himself.

The big question that I asked myself was if I really needed all those plugins. Before I could answer that question I had to find out which were installed. The command about:plugins in the address bar reveals all plugins currently loaded in Firefox. I discovered several plugins that I was not using for sure and some that I did not want to mess with.

An Adobe Reader plugin was still installed although I did uninstall the program a while ago. I discovered a Microsoft Office 2007 plugin, a Real Player plugin, AOL Media Playback plugin, Windows Presentation Foundation plugin and several more that I was pretty sure about that I did not need them.

The location of those plugins was mentioned in that menu as well which made it easy to track them down. I decided to move all plugins that I thought that I did not need anymore to a temporary location. This ensured that I would be able to move them back if I would discover that an application or website would need those plugins.

You should refresh the settings once you moved those plugins because sometimes other applications tend to take the place of those that you have removed.