If you select Tools -> Add-ons from the Firefox menu bar, you’ll get a list of all extensions, themes and plug-ins that are currently installed in your copy of Firefox.

The same add-ons dialog has a “Find Updates” feature to help you figure out if you are running any out-dated extensions but that doesn’t work with your plug-ins. How do you then find out that you are running the latest versions of all plug-ins?

It’s simple now. You can open the Firefox browser and visit the Plugins Check page hosted on mozilla.org. This will create a list of all plug-ins that are installed on your system and will match that data with its own list to determine if you are running an older version that has been marked out-of-date.

In case this online check fails for a particular plugin, you can click the “Research” button to perform a search on Google using the plug-in name as the search query. This is not always accurate but you’ll at least reach the vendor’s website that is officially hosting the plug-in.

It makes sense to visit the plug-ins checker page occasionally because older plug-ins not just make your browser insecure but they also make it more unstable. David Tenser of Mozilla says 30% of the reported crashes are caused by old plugins.

Most of us use the same web browser across multiple computers. Synchronisation tools such as Mozilla Weave or Foxmarks enable us to keep the same bookmarks across various computers where you have Firefox installed. It’s a seamless process. Just add a website to your bookmarks and, when you start up your other computer, you’ll find the same bookmark updated in Firefox.

Snag is, we don’t always use the same browser on every machine. Some users prefer Firefox on their Windows desktop and Safari on their Mac-based laptop. Now with Google Chrome, some users have moved to this as their browser of choice. Sadly there’s no Mac or Linux version available.

Synchronising different bookmarks across your computers is another problem entirely. You can’t synchronise your Firefox and Safari bookmarks, automatically.

Transmute is an answer to this problem. It is a simple conversion tool that enables you to import bookmarks from one browser and then export for another. For example, load the bookmarks from Google Chrome on your Windows desktop and export for Apple Safari on your Mac.

The only downside is that this app is Windows-only, so you can’t convert between your Mac browsers.

Note that this is the portable version of Transmute.

[ Download Tranmute ]