According to the Director of Firefox Development, Johnathan Nightingale, plugin safety is an issue across the web. "Outdated plugins are a major source of security and stability risk for web users," he wrote in a recent company blog post.

Nightingale says that some studies have shown that the number of users running outdated plugins in their web browser is as high as 80%. However, the plugin checking mechanism built into the latest builds of the Firefox web browser keeps its users better secured as it will prompt you to update your plugins when new ones become available. He notes that over 60% of Firefox users visiting the plugin checker page were running the most recent version of the Adobe Flash plugin, a plugin that's a popular target for attackers looking to exploit security vulnerabilities in the browser. When including users with either the latest version of the Flash plugin or the second most recent, the number was 75%, much higher than the rest of the web as a whole.

Beyond Firefox: Plugin Safety for All Browsers

But plugin safety isn't just an issue for Firefox users. All web surfers who use plugins can be affected by security issues. And most do have plugins, even if they don't realize it.

Mainstream users may not understand that clicking "install Flash" to watch a web video means they've installed a browser plugin, but that's exactly what they just did. And now in Google Chrome, the new web browser from the Internet Search giant, the Adobe Flash plugin will come pre-installed with the browser itself.

To help address the issues of plugin safety outside the Firefox ecosystem, Mozilla has updated their plugin safety page to work with a number of other web browsers, including Safari 4, Chrome 4 and Opera 10.5. It also checks the safety levels of the most popular plugins for Internet Explorer 7 and 8.

If you're using a non-Firefox browser such as those listed above, you can visit this Mozilla webpage and have your plugins checked for you. If any of the plugins are old, just click the "Update Now" button to remedy the situation. If the plugin checker can't determine the status of the plugin, a "Research" button will appear instead. Plugins that are current will show a green "Up to Date" button.

Reminder Badges

Web site owners who want to remind their visitors to check their plugins can add one of these quirky banners to their site. "Groom parrot, Polish trophies, Check plugins," the banner reads.

Although the plugin checker page is a handy tool for web surfers concerned about security, it's better when the browser does it for you. Our online lives are busy enough, we don't need to add another to-do item to our list.

Now, an updated version of Mozilla Contacts (download link) introduces a number of new features, most notably integration with Facebook Contacts and something called a "person URL."

Mozilla Contacts' ability to sync with your Facebook Contacts come via the brand-new Facebook Graph API (application programming interface), which allows the Firefox addon to import all your Facebook friends into the Web browser itself as it does with the other services supported.

However, this integration is still a little iffy, warns Michael Hansson, an engineer in Mozilla Labs, on a blog post about the release. "You may need to Refresh your connection to Facebook on occasion to make it work properly," he says.

Person URLs

Also new in Mozilla Contacts 0.3 is experimental support for "person:" URLs. This intriguing feature lets you look up anyone in your various contact lists or anyone on the Web just by typing a URL in your address bar. After doing so, Firefox will combine the locally stored information in the Web browser with Web-based information retrieved from the Internet to return a profile page about that person.

You can try it now by typing person:mhanson@gmail.com or person:http://facebook.com/btaylor, for example, into your Firefox browser that has the updated Contacts addon installed.

Also New in 0.3

Other additions in version 0.3 include support for Yahoo contacts, autocompletion of HTML5 input fields (with "email" and "tel"), enhanced search capabilities (including new discovery modules for Webfinger, HCard import, Google Social Graph, Facebook, Gravatar, Yelp, Amazon and Flickr), automatic combination of data discovered on sites that support standard automatic discovery mechanisms like HCard, RSS and ActivityStreams, and finally, support for non-contact people in the AwesomeBar.

Does this sound familiar? It should, if you're a Google Chrome user.

The same philosophy is now seen in Firefox's latest. The Lorentz build, which initially focuses on just Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime and Microsoft Silverlight, isolates plugins in separate instances, too. The end result? A browser that doesn't completely tank quite so often.

If you do end up with a page that goes rogue, however, the screen turns grey and you're notified of the plugin crash by way of a text message and a sad-faced lego-like logo. (See picture).

This image also seems to be cribbed from Chrome's playbook as it closely resembles the sad tab image that accompanies Google Chrome's "Aw Snap!" message that appears when something goes wrong with a web page. (Then again, a sad computer icon isn't anything new, as Mac users will certainly tell you.) But in this case, it's another reminder of how Firefox, once thought to be leading the way in browser innovations, now seems to be following in Google's footsteps.

That said, Firefox enthusiasts are sure to welcome this change. And if you want to get all hacker-ish, you can even configure Firefox to isolate more plugins, too, as the Mozilla Links blog explains (via LifeHacker):

To have the Adobe Reader plugin running on its own process, create a boolean preference in about:config, name it dom.ipc.plugins.enabled.nppdf32.dll, set it to true, and restart. For Java, the preference must be named dom.ipc.plugins.enabled.npjp2.dll. You just need to know the name of the library (which you get from about:plugins), and create the preference accordingly.

To try Lorentz for yourself, you can grab the latest build here.

Users of WordPress' hosted service have their blogs backed up automatically (so to speak). So if something goes pear-shaped, the content is caught before it hits the ground. However, if you use a self-hosted version of the software you must back up your content yourself, and heaven help you if you forget.

Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automattic, announced the plugin on the VaultPress blog.

"Today, this means every bit of content will be safe, from plugins and themes to the smallest comment or post revision, with WordPress-aware, real-time, multi-cloud backups."

In an email, he said, "In the past two hours we've had over 600 beta applications with an average of 9 sites each."

The product alleges "real-time, continuous monitoring" of your site against dangerous and fraudulent activity. It also automatically updates fixes.

Interested users can sign up for VaultPress in private beta. Automattic plans to charge $15.00 per month for the service.

We first reviewed Glubble's browser plugin in 2007 (we called it 'impressive' back then) and we also took a closer look at the service's web offering in late 2008. We really liked the service in its earlier iterations, and since then, it has only become better. For a more detailed look at Glubble's features, please have a look at our earlier reviews.

Timeline

Alexander van Elsas, Glubble's CEO, gave us a demo of the service last week and he was clearly proud of the new timeline feature. While a lot of photo sharing services have moved towards organizing photos based on events, Glubble decided to go with a strict chronological order. The top of the page features a calendar, where you can pick a date, and the second row then features thumbnails from the four preceding and following days.

The timeline isn't quite as fancy as thisMoment's similar feature, but then, thisMoment, which came out of beta this week, is targeting a different audience. Glubble, however, does a great job at keeping things simple - an important aspect for a site that doesn't target cutting-edge users but wants to be inclusive even to novices on the web.

New CEO, New Funding

In addition to these new features, Glubble also announced that it received $1 million in a new funding round. With Alexander van Elsas, the company now also has a new CEO. Van Elsas used to be Glubble's COO, and takes over from Willem-Jan Schutte, one of Glubble's founders, who will remain on the non-executive board.

The core of the plugin is the ticker, though, which also features a nice pop-up with a story's excerpt when you hover the mouse over a story. While a lot of similar tickers can be distracting because the developers insist on making new stories scroll horizontally, Feedinvader just fades stories in and out, making the ticker far less intrusive.

Feedinvader's feed reader itself is also worth a look, too, though in its current iteration, it is held back by a few missing features. By default, Feedinvader uses a standard, email client-like, three-pane view, with a color scheme that is somewhat reminiscent of Microsoft Outlook. You can also switch to an 'expanded' view that shows the full content of a feed without a separate pane for the headlines, but one feature we really missed in Feedinvader was a river of news-style view. What's far worse, though, is that you can't mark a story as read, and hence you also can't see how many unread items you have in any given feed or folder, making Feedinvader almost completely useless as a stand-alone feed reader.

On the positive side, the RSS reader does allow users to import and export OPML files and even import Live Bookmarks from Firefox.

If you like the ticker feature, then the feed reader definitely makes for a good way to manage these feeds, but we wouldn't recommend you ditch your favorite RSS reader like Google Reader, FeedDemon, or NetNewsWire for it.

As of now, because feeds aren't marked as read (at least as far as we can see), the ticker will loop from feed to feed, instead of listing stories in chronological order, making it best for small, high-value collections of feeds instead of a way of keeping an eye on a large collection of sources. Because of this, we would rather recommend you use a program like Snackr if you are looking for a news ticker.

You can also interact with the items being tracked via the Glue plugin which features a "like" button and another "2 Cents" button which lets you leave a comment about whatever it is you're viewing.

As with the previously released Firefox plugin, the Glue IE plugin also delivers the same type of interactions as you would expect: the connected conversations around everyday things, recommendations, and web-wide "top lists" that include the top items across the entire Glue network.

You can grab the Glue IE plugin from the main page of the Glue web site here. Note: the "Download" button still features the Firefox logo only at this time, but clicking the button reveals the IE download is available as well.

Disclosure: Alex Iskold (@alexiskold) is the founder of AdaptiveBlue, the company behind Glue, and occasional RWW feature writer.

In saying that, you may think we're overlooking Office Live Workspace, Microsoft's own web-based service for storing and sharing documents with family, friends, or colleagues. After all, it does come with its own plugin for the Microsoft Office software which allows you to both open and save documents to and from your online workspace.

However, while both Google Docs and Office Live provide online storage and easy ways to share files, Google Docs has Office Live beat when it comes to collaboration, a key reason for the service's popularity. Where Office Live uses SharedView for screen sharing a document with another user in real-time, Google Docs allows multiple users to collaborate in real-time without the need for desktop software. Google's service can even alert you via email notifications when changes have been made. Microsoft's soon-to-arrive "Office Web Applications" may end up giving Google Docs a run for their money (especially considering it will work on the iPhone), but at the moment, Google Docs is the better choice for real-time collaboration.

Why OffiSync?

The only problem with Google Docs is that, in some people's opinion, it's just not as good as Microsoft Office software. Of course, that's an entirely subjective statement - you may or may not agree (In fact, it's likely you don't, given that you're reading a blog about web apps and web technology). Still, there's a large user base of folks who launch Office every day instead of a browser, and it's for those people that OffiSync was designed.

Test Drive

Through a simple Office plugin, you're provided with a new menu seamlessly integrated into either your Microsoft Office 2003 or 2007 software.

From the menu, you can open, save, search, email, and more, as you can see from the image above. In this case, "open" and "save" refers to opening and saving to and from Google Docs, not your PC.

Saving Files

Our one complaint involves the "Save" and "Save As" options. When we opened an Office document that was saved only on our PC, and went to upload it (save it) to Google Docs, neither "Save" nor "Save As" defaulted the title of the doc to what it was already named. Instead, it displayed "untitled." This is obviously only a minor issue, but one that becomes an annoyance if you use OffiSync to upload a lot of previously local-only files to the Google Docs service.

Browsing & Interacting with Google Docs

Using either the Save or Open menu options, you'll be presented with a dialog box which has tabs for both browsing and searching your Google Docs. There's even a drop-down box that lets you switch between multiple Google accounts if necessary.

We were surprised that you could even interact with the Google Docs service from within this dialog box. For example, a right-click on any folder gave us options to create a new folder, delete the folder, or refresh. This was especially handy as we began to upload and organize our local stash of files. You can also drag-and-drop files from one folder to another.

Searching

The search feature also worked really well, searching not only document titles, but also within the documents themselves. However, if you're looking for a document title using partial text, you'll need to use an asterisk (*) in order for the search feature to locate your file.

Collaborating

With the plugin, you can invite collaborators or modify their permissions. In a dialog box, you simply enter their email address, assign read or write permissions, then click "Save." You can then choose to write a short message and configure your notification options. It's just as easy as using the Google Docs service itself.

At the moment, in order to see real-time edits, you still have to use the Google Docs service in the browser. However, OffiSync creator, Oudi Antebi, is working on a feature that will let users see updates in real-time as two or more people open the file in Office.

Conclusion

The OffiSync software is shaping up to become a must-have add-on for anyone who can't part with their Office installation but wants to enjoy the features of Google's cloud-based service. It may even provide some competition for the upcoming Office Web Applications...if OffiSync ever expands beyond Word, Excel and PowerPoint, that is.

Antebi plans to keep OffiSync free for consumers but charge for the enterprise version, which will be available later this year. It's hard to say if that's the right strategy - after all, we're consumers and we'd be willing to pay for this plugin - it's that good. But given Microsoft's plans to debut their own Office web apps later this year, Antebi may have no other choice but to keep it free for consumers in order to stay competitive.

We just hope that OffiSync doesn't end up with the same fate as that other Google Docs/local docs sync service DocSyncer - they didn't make it. But, we think there's a chance that OffiSync will be able to thrive where that service did not thanks to Antebi's plans to integrate even more Google Services (like Google Maps) into the software in the future. That alone, could give it a unique selling point that no one else provides. He also plans on making the search feature more robust, giving users smart filters to find the files based on metadata (names of collaborators, file type, size, location, etc.). That, too, will be a useful feature - especially as more and more of our documents are transitioned to Google's web-based service.

If you want to try OffiSync for yourself, you can. The download is now available for everyone from the OffiSync web site.

This, of course, isn't all KwiClick does. Besides doing simple web searches, KwiClick also allows you to search YouTube, Twitter, Wikipedia, Flickr, Friendfeed, and it can take addresses and quickly display a map as well. And those are just the default services, KwiClick can also show you results from 10 more services, including delicious, Technorati, and Amazon.

Sharing and Videos

In addition, after installing KwiClick, a small list of icons will appear next to videos and images on YouTube, Vimeo, and Flickr. These icons allow you to watch the video or display an image in the detached Kwiclick window, share it with friends, find related videos, or more videos from the same producer all while the video continues to play in the background. KwiClick also allows you to share interesting videos you find on most of the popular content sharing services, including Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, and Stumbleupon.

All of these results, as well as the embedded videos, are displayed in a dedicated window which always stays on top of your Firefox window. If you like working with mouse gestures, KwiClick also integrates nicely with FireGestures.

KwiClick Does Help You Get Stuff Done Faster

The most important advantage of using KwiClick is that you can perform searches without having to leave the page you are currently on. Microsoft, of course, is playing with some of the same ideas with its Accelerator features in IE8, and other plugins replicate some of KwiClick's features as well. But as an all-in-one tool, KwiClick looks like it could indeed make you more productive while using Firefox (though our own Marshall Kirkpatrick still loves his Drag and Drop Zones plugin for speeding up his searches).