Google Chrome says goodbye to outdated plugins

You may have already known this, but web browser plugins are responsible for a lot of Internet-based attacks and hacks these days. And it’s the outdated ones who are more likely to make your computer prone to being attacked. One example is the Adobe Flash plugin, which is arguably the most vulnerable plugin ever (but also the most useful of them all, so you don’t have much room to go around using Adobe Flash).

Anyway, browser developers realized something was going on, and they started working. The guys from Firefox were the fastest, and the introduced the Mozilla Plugin Check website, which verifies the browser after each Firefox update. The site is really great, because you can check plugins from all web browser, not only the Mozilla ones. However, the feature won’t tell you when exactly do the plugins become outdate, so you’ll have to do manual checks more often.

Google thought it would be a good idea if it released its own tool, a program which can disable outdated plugins, that are known to be vulnerable. What’s more, the tool, already available in the Google Chrome Dev, searches and offers updates for the plugin. Note that the existent plugin will be disabled only if an update is already available. The tech giant didn’t give a list of supported plugins, so nobody can tell which and how many plugins can be updated using the tool. Probably they will include the most commonly used plugins. I, for one, hope that they thought about the Adobe Flash plugin, because it’s one of the most insecure.

In the near future, we should expect a tool that can disable plugins based on security notifications. And maybe Microsoft will be the one to release it, with rivals Firefox and Google already implementing plugin disabling tools to their browsers.