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system and will match that data with its own list to determine if you are running an older version that has been marked out-of-date.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.

Vacuum Places Improved adds a small icon to the Firefox status bar that, when clicked automatically “vacuums” your Places database—the one that slows down Firefox when it gets fragmented. You can also automate the task by ticking the Automatically clean places checkbox in the Vacuum Places Improved extension Preferences and entering your desired number of Firefox startups since last cleaning.

It still doesn’t solve one of the biggest items on our Firefox wishlist (i.e., better memory management), but at least its an easy way to execute one of the workarounds.

Vacuum Places Improved is an experimental extension (so install with caution), works wherever Firefox does.

[ Download Vacuum Places Improved ]

Many Youtube users do not like the fact that Youtube videos start playing as soon as the video is opened. This objection has several reasons. The most prominent ones are that users with slow connections can experience pauses during playback as the video download speed is slower than the playback speed of the video. Another reason becomes apparent if users open multiple videos at once on Youtube. All of these videos start playing as soon as the page has loaded which is obviously not a good experience.

The Greasemonkey script Youtube Auto Buffer And Auto HD and Remove Ads offers a quick and unobtrusive solution to that problem and two additional ones.

Youtube videos will automatically buffer completely without playback. Users who want to do that manually need to press the pause button on each video so that the video is not played but the contents are buffered. The script automates that process.

The Greasemonkey script adds two additional features. The first will automatically load the HD version of the opened Youtube videos. That’s a feature that most Youtube scripts and add-ons provides. The second will remove those annoying ads that are displayed at the bottom of Youtube videos.

Some users reported that they got the script working not only in the Firefox web browser but also in Opera. Interested users can download it from the Userscripts website.

Firefox extension about:me displays statistics and graphs showing your browsing and downloading history over time, so you can see a more detailed view of when and where you’ve been spending your time.

Once you’ve installed the extension, you can simply type about:me into the address bar to see graphs and statistics of your most frequently used sites, downloads, and even your browsing history in an hourly format so you can see when you tend to do the most browsing. You can drill down into each site, or each type of download to see even more information about the pages you are visiting the most, as well as the types of files you are downloading. About:me is a free download, works anywhere Firefox does.

[Download about:me]

A staffer asked Hillary Clinton why Internet Explorer is mandated, even though Firefox, which is free and is security-approved for the “entire intelligence community.” The answer? A whole lot of bloviating and nonsense about “expense.”