plug-ins

A number of people have complained about Safari often crashing on their systems. While Apple's latest Safari update (5.0.1) is supposed to address some stability issues with the program,  a number of people are complaining of crashes. Here are some things you can try to hopefully clear these problems.

General maintenanceThere are some general maintenance routines you can run both on Safari and on the system to help clear problems. In Safari, try clearing cookies and caches, among other items in the "Reset Safari" option in the Safari menu. You can also run general … Read more

It's a fair question for photography enthusiasts uploading their latest shots to the Web or backing up an archive: where do you set the JPEG quality slider?

Sure, a higher setting means more quality but bigger files, but beyond that vagueness, it's a question without easy answers. Happily, at least for those using Adobe Systems' Lightroom software for photo editing and cataloging, there's an answer coming.

That's because Lightroom plug-in programmer Jeffrey Friedl is adding some quality automation tools to his image export software. Earlier this month he posted an analysis of Lightroom's JPEG photo quality … Read more

BrowserCheck, from security company Qualys, evaluates your installed plug-ins and lets you know if they need to be updated. It's identical in function to Mozilla's Plugin Check, although it appears to be far more limited in scope for now.

Qualys' BrowserCheck helpfully targets out-of-date plug-ins, and provides links to download updates. Oddly, the service takes a unique approach by requiring the user to install a Qualys add-on before it will scan for out-of-date plug-ins. This is likely to frustrate many users, especially in the face of Mozilla's service, which doesn't require an additional add-on and currently … Read more

How many miles a Chevrolet Volt can travel on a single gallon of gas is still up for debate. The EPA rejected the formula that General Motors used to calculate its 230 mpg estimate for the extended range vehicle. In GM's defense, it used a draft formula that the EPA developed for testing plug-in hybrid vehicles.

Using those calculations, GM has been promoting a 40-mile range on a single charge of the battery when driving the Volt in EV mode. Yet when using its gasoline-powered engine generator to propel the vehicle, the Volt would be able to extend its … Read more

Mozilla has disabled and added to a block list a Firefox add-on that stole log-in information when users visited Web sites, the company says.

The software, called Mozilla Sniffer, had been downloaded about 1,800 times in the approximately five weeks it was available on addons.mozilla.org, Mozilla reported in a blog post on Tuesday.

The blocklist will prompt the add-on to be uninstalled for computers running the program. Users who installed it should change their passwords.

Mozilla Sniffer intercepts login data and sends it to a remote server that appeared to be down, according to the blog post. … Read more

On the heels of Google introducing automatic updating for the Adobe Flash plug-in, a future version of Google Chrome will include technology that blocks out-of-date plug-ins and helps users update them, Google said.

The company did not provide a timeline for this feature, except to say it will be "medium-term," in a post Monday on The Chromium Blog.

The browser also will eventually offer a warning when a user is about to run infrequently used plug-ins.

"Some plug-ins are widely installed but typically not required for today's Internet experience," the post said. "For most … Read more

Mozilla pushed out a minor update to Firefox on Saturday, slightly adjusting the new plug-in crash protection feature that was introduced last week. Firefox 3.6.6 for Windows and Linux delays the amount of time that the plug-in protection module will wait before terminating an unresponsive plug-in.

Mozilla evangelist Mike Beltzner said in a blog post on Saturday that although Firefox 3.6.4 was beta-tested with nearly 1 million users, after its release the company began hearing complaints from some users, especially those playing games on older computers. The crash protection feature would only wait 10 seconds before … Read more

Since Safari 5 came out, a few people have complained of the application crashing. A couple of weeks ago we wrote an article outlining some of the steps to take if the application crashes at launch, but other times the program will seem to crash on a more sporadic basis.… Read more

Firefox 3.6.4 might not sound like a major update, but the latest version debuts an important new feature for Mozilla's browser. Code-named "Lorentz" and available for Windows and Linux, the update includes the highly-anticipated Out-of-Process Plug-in (OOPP) "sandboxing" feature that prevents specific plug-ins that crash from taking down the entire browser. In this initial implementation, OOPP will prevent Adobe Flash, Apple QuickTime, and Microsoft Silverlight crashes from causing browser-wide instability.

While Mac users do get the security fixes made in their version of Firefox 3.6.4, they won't get OOPP support. … Read more