Browse More Quickly and Securely: How to Keep Google Chrome Plug-ins Up-to-date

Java, Flash, Silverlight, QuickTime and Adobe Reader—these plug-ins (and many more like them) are often required to display online content. However, keeping them up-to-date can be a bit of a hassle. This week’s fantastic blog post by our loyal reader Ishan from ILoveFreesoftware.com shows the best way to keep all of Google Chrome’s plug-ins up-to-date.

Introducing “Secbrowsing”

Secbrowsing is a free browser extension for Google Chrome that checks all of your installed plug-ins to see if any of them are out-of-date. If it does find an old plug-in, it will automatically give you a direct link to its latest version. It’s very important to keep all of these plug-ins upto-date, as older versions can sometimes pose a serious security risk.

Before we go further, it’s important to understand that by “plug-ins”, I don’t mean browser extensions that you might have installed in Google Chrome. In this post, we talk about plug-ins that are normally installed to make web pages appear correctly, like Flash, QuickTime, Adobe Reader, Java and Silverlight, among others.

It’s very easy to use Secbrowsing. Just install the program, and you’ll see an icon in your Google Chrome address bar (as pictured below).

Whenever you move your cursor over this icon, it’ll highlight any outdated plug-ins. If it shows any outdated plug-ins, just click on the icon itself. It’ll open a new tab in which it shows the status of all of the installed plug-ins and tell you which ones you should update.

The Secbrowsing-Google Chrome extension is completely free and very easy to use which makes me really wish the web browser itself was able to keep track of all such outdated plug-ins. Until that happens, Secbrowsing is a good extension to keep handy.

This blog post was written by our guest writer Ishan. Want to read more of his articles? You’ll find him over at ILoveFreesoftware.com.