Inside My Creaky Green Van

If the word plug-ins came to mind, then you are weird, like me!

My week-old copy of Windows Secrets has a freebie for all of us:
search tools for Firefox and IE7.

One plug-in uses software provided by Google (“the Google API”) to provide highly relevant search results for Microsoft Windows technical information.

The other plug-in combs through the WindowsSecrets.com article archive for, um, archived articles.

Vickie Stevens, the research director at WindowsSecrets.com, wrote the code for both plug-ins.

So, what does this have to do with cigarette lighters?

Nothing, unless you’re really weird, in which case, the phrase Auto Discovery might evoke an image of a creaky old van that uses a Radio Shack converter to turn an even creakier cassette tape player into an MP3 music machine.

But that’s for another post.

Auto discovery, in the context of plug-ins, is a feature of both IE7 and Firefox, which displays available plug-ins when you visit a web page that offers such gadgets.

Before auto-discovery, you had to (gasp!) click a link, download the plug-in and confirm that you didn’t just download the file for kicks.

Firefox has a simple menu item that automatically installs the selected plug-in.

IE7 still makes you confirm installation.

Yet another reason to switch to Firefox.