Firefox Tool Makes Checking For Updates Easy (Easier!)

For those of you are are Firefox users, I found a tool that allows you to see what parts of your browser need updating.  The tool is a web page on Mozilla’s web site.   Maybe everyone else knows about it and I have been living in a cave.  Maybe there is a similar one for Chrome or Internet Explorer, but I haven’t seen one.  Post a comment if you have more information and I can update this post.

To use it, go to

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/plugincheck/ 

Once the page loads, you will see something like this (click on the image to see a larger version):

As you might expect, red is bad (vulnerable), yellow is not so good (not vulnerable, but not current) and green is what you would like.  Interestingly, they blew their own color scheme with the Firefox update that was needed at the top.  That should have been yellow in my opinion.

Mozilla provides links to the appropriate sites so that you can download and install the needed updates.  Unfortunately, this web page does not simplify the installation process.  It took me about an hour to install all the updates I needed on this computer.

Although not in the screen shot, there is also a blue section at the bottom.  Blue means that we really don’t know if this is OK or not.  Unfortunately, iTunes falls into the blue category.  I suspect that Apple won’t give a competitor the tools to find out the answer.  Who suffers from that is the user, not Apple, so I hope that is not the reason.

After I installed the updates, the screen looked like this;  in this shot you can see the blue section:

I went around the house today updating my browser plugins.  A fun thing to do on a Sunday.

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