[thelist] top plug ins?

John Dowdell jdowdell at macromedia.com
Thu Aug 16 15:08:32 CDT 2001


At 9:26 AM 8/16/1, McAtee, Malcolm wrote:
> Does any one have a resource for a (non-biased?!?)
> list of browser plug-ins???

I'm not sure whether "top" means "recommended by someone", or "in actual
usage", or something else. ("plug ins" could also be read as only Netscape
Plugins, or both NS Plugins and ActiveX Controls, which are the two common
browser-extension mechanisms.)

For Netscape's self-professed list of "Must-Have Plug-ins", see:
http://home.netscape.com/plugins/

To see a fuller list of Netscape Plugins, try the search form at:
http://home.netscape.com/plugins/search_pi.html

To see the results of the June 2001 consumer audit by Media Metrix, which
quarterly asks regular consumer focus groups whether they can immediately
view particular types of content in their current browser, see:
<http://www.macromedia.com/software/player_census/flashplayer/tech_breakdown
.html>



I'm not sure of the source of Malcolm's list, but it seems that that test
did a navigator.plugins query on only Netscape browsers, from some
particular sample. (StatMarket and its related sites use this approach.)
This measures only browser-shim presence, rather than full viewability...
the QuickTime and Beatnik shims are plugins to the browser, but require a
few megabytes of system extensions for actual viewability.

ActiveX Control installations are often an order of magnitude higher than
Netscape Plugin installations, and such a methodology further diverges from
actual viewability in this way too.

("LiveAudio" is the default audio plugin for Netscape browsers. I don't
know how this can measure at only 74% of browsers polled.)


jd






John Dowdell, Macromedia Tech Support, San Francisco CA US
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