January 2015

If you have ever bought a PC running Windows, you may have had to deal with quite a few programs and other annoyances installed by the manufacturer of the device.

It is common that factory bought PCs ship with program trial versions installed that will run only for 30 or so days before they need to be purchased.

Other annoyances may include desktop shortcuts to places like eBay on the Internet, or a bunch of applications by the manufacturer such as customer satisfactory surveys and such.

When you check out telemetry data that Mozilla collects about hangs in its Firefox web browser, you will notice that plugin-related issues are overrepresented there.

Plugins in this context refers exclusively to NPAPI plugins that the Firefox web browser supports such as Adobe Flash, Silverlight or Unity.

Whenever a Firefox user visits a web page that runs code that requires plugins, they need to be initialized.