Word Association: Web Browsers, Vehicle Cigarette Lighters
June 14th, 2008 | by Mitchell Allen |
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.
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