We leave it at that for the moment. Now, Firefox users end up with plugins installed that they have not added to the browser. On our test system those were for instance: (name, description)

• Google Update: Google Update
• Microsoft Office 2010: Office Authorization plug-in for NPAPI browsers
• Microsoft Office 2010: The plug-in allows you to open and edit files using Microsoft Office applications
• Quicktime Plug-In: The Quicktime Plugin allows you to view a wide variety of multimedia content in Web pages. For more information, visit the QuickTime Web site.
• Silverlight Plug-In
• Windows Live Photo Gallery: NPWLPG

Other Firefox users will probably find other plugins there that have been installed automatically.

Plugins can be disabled in the Plugins manager, but not uninstalled or removed completely from the web browser. Entering about:plugins in the Firefox address bar will display additional information about each installed plugin. Users who visit the screen for the first time may want to type in about:config first, to change the preference plugin.expose_full_path to true. This displays the path to the plugin in the about:plugins dialog.

Displaying the path to the plugin does one thing: It enables the user to locate the plugin source on the hard drive. Just open the folder on the hard drive afterwards, backup the plugin file and delete it afterwards to remove it completely from Firefox. Here is how it is done for the two Microsoft Office 2010 plugins.

Locate the plugin paths in about:plugins and open the folders on the hard drive. In the case of Microsoft Office 2010, both plugins are located in the C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office14\ folder on the hard drive (Please note, that the location on 32-bit systems is C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14\ instead).

The name of the first plugin is NPAUTHZ.DLL, the one of the second NPSPWRAP.DLL. We highly suggest to backup plugins before deleting them from the system, just in case they need to be restored at a later time. Plugins can be deleted while the browser is running, and doing so will immediately remove most of them from the about:plugins information window and the plugins manager in Tools > Add-ons. Some plugins may require a browser restart before they are completely removed from the browser.

To remove all plugins that are not used or needed simply go through the listing of plugins in about:plugins, locate the paths of those plugins on the hard drive, and backup and delete the plugin files.

There is also the possibility that some plugins have added themselves in the Windows Registry, Google Update comes to mind for instance. You can take a look at this guide How To Stop Automatic Plugin Installations In Firefox for an in depth walkthrough, or locate HKLM\Software\MozillaPlugins or HKLU\Software\MozillaPlugins in the Windows Registry to see if plugins have been added there as well. Again, export the Registry key first before deleting it, for the ability to restore the setting at a later time.

This changes with Google New, at least according to Google. Google New is the new central hub for all updates on Google products. Some may think it is one big advertisement, which it more or less is, but it still offers valuable information on new and updated products.

When you visit the place for the first time you notice that the upper half of the page is reserved for a product that they want to promote, while the lower half lists the new and updated products chronologically.

google new

A filter on top of those product updates offers to filter the products by name or area of interest. Users who only want to see the latest news on Google Search or Adsense, or all business or developer based products can use the filters on top to do so. A search complements the filter bar.

A total of nine updates are displayed per page which usually covers a few days of Google updates. Sharing options are displayed next to each update. There is however no option to subscribe to an RSS feed on the page, which would make things a lot simpler for users who want to receive update notifications whenever they are published on Google New.

We have created a basic feed using the Feed43 service so that you can subscribe to new updates in your favorite RSS feed reader.

Just use this feed url to subscribe to the Google New RSS feed. Please note that each feed item links to the product’s page on Google New, and not the news item itself. There may be an option to do that as well, let us know if you find a way.

Search becomes polluted with ads and additional options that most users do not want or seem to care about. Even worse, the search quality seems to have dropped in that time as well.

The newest addition to Google Search is a change for some searches, that will have a huge impact on search engine users and webmasters.

Before the change, a single domain could only occupy two slots of the ten available slots on any page in the results. Authoritative sites were able to get an additional boost with site links, displayed under their first result.

With the change, a single site can occupy up to seven of the ten slots on any Google search results page, leaving three for other domains.

The example that Samarth Keshava, Software Engineer at Google gives is a search for exhibitions at amnh which now displays seven results from the official American Museum of Natural History website in the top seven slots of the search results.

Why is that bad? Mainly because the first link in the search results lists the official exhibitions page at the museum. The remaining six results lists specific exhibitions, which the user could also access by clicking on the first search result.

And Google did even offer a solution for this cases until now by displaying the “more results from domain” beneath the search listing.

And then there is the site: command, which would only display search results from a specific domain if desired.

There are situations where a query like this may make sense, for instance when looking for articles on a specific site, e.g. ghacks windows which now behaves similar to the site command, by displaying multiple site listings of the site.

In the end, it depends on the reach of the new feature. If Google has managed to limit it to very specific queries, where users are searching for information from the site, then it’s a welcome addition.

If they however did not find the right ratio, then it may put a lot of businesses and websites in jeopardy. Webmasters who would like to discuss the topic find threads in all popular webmaster forums, including Webmaster World.

What’s your take on this change in Google Search?

To find out if it is running in Windows press [Ctrl Alt Del] on your keyboard to open the Windows Task Manager. According to Google GoogleCrashHandler.exe has the following characteristics:

GoogleCrashHandler.exe runs continuously on your computer if you’ve selected to send anonymous usage statistics and crash reports to Google for certain Google software, like Google Chrome. It helps send crash details to Google when your Google software unexpectedly shuts down. We use this data to help determine how to prevent these errors from happening in the future.

The process can be turned off in the installed Google programs. That could be a bit of a problem if several Google applications are installed on the computer system. In Google Chrome – Google’s web browser – you have to go to into the Options, switch to the Under The Hood tab and remove the checkmark in front of “Help make Google Chrome better by automatically sending usage statistics and crash reports to Google”.

Other Google applications have similar options. If more than one Google app is installed you need to go through all of them to turn off the crash reporting in all of them. Once that is done GoogleCrashHandler.exe will not be running on the computer system anymore starting with the next start of the computer system (restart or kill the process for immediate effect).

It also did feel strange that Google needed a process to update their programs while other companies like Mozilla did not. Especially if the only software by Google was their web browser Google Chrome.

Google has announced changes yesterday that will please many computer users. They basically changed Google Update from running in the background permanently to a process that would check for updates periodically which basically eliminates the googleupdate.exe process in the background as it will terminate after the check for updates.

Users can check the Task Scheduler in the Windows Control Panel to change the frequency of the update checks. The Google team points out that the process might be running continuously on some computer systems if problems are encountered with the task scheduler and Windows Services.

It was not transparent which data was transferred to Google servers while running Google Updater; And as the software was running in the background all the time it was probably the major concern that was voiced by users and privacy advocates. Google would not be Google if they could not come up with a solution to those privacy concerns: Their solution was to make Google Updater Open Source so that anyone (well not really anyone but those with the skill and knowledge to do so) could analyse the source in detail to find out about the data connections of the application. Google Updater was released with the codename Omaha at Google Code where it can be publicly downloaded.

Users who are interested in removal instructions can take a look at our article about removing Google Update on the Windows operating system.

Googleupdate.exe uses about 1.6 Megabytes of computer memory while running. This might not be much on computer systems that have Gigabytes of computer memory but can make a difference on low end systems. There is however another aspect that requires some attention. Googleupdate.exe will send data to the Google server whenever it checks for updates.

This data includes a unique ID number, languages, operating systems, version numbers and other install or update related details. Disabling the googleupdate.exe process is thankfully not complicated. The process can easily be killed at any time and will not appear again in the process list during that session.

The Google Update process is added as a service during the first installation of a Google software that makes use of it. To change its behavior one would simply open the services configuration with [Windows R], [services.msc] and hitting [enter]. The service is called Google Update Service (gupdatexxx) with xxx being a random ID)

A double-click on GoogleUpdate.exe will open the properties of the services with the option to change the startup type from automatic to disabled.

A click on the apply button will change the setting and ensure that Googleupdate.exe will not be started during Windows startup anymore. Another click on Stop will stop the process for the current session.