Compared To Extensions
Extensions differ slightly from plug-ins. Plug-ins usually have a narrow set of abilities. For example, the original impetus behind the development of Mozilla Firefox was the pursuit of a small baseline application, leaving exotic or personalized functionality to be implemented by extensions to avoid feature creep. This is in contrast to the "kitchen sink" approach in its predecessors, the Mozilla Application Suite and Netscape 6 and 7. Therefore, after integration, extensions can be seen as part of the browser itself, tailored from a set of optional modules.
Firefox also supports plug-ins using NPAPI. When the browser encounters references to content a plug-in specializes in, the data is handed off to be processed by that plug-in. Since there is generally a clear separation between the browser and the plug-in, the results are discrete objects embedded within a webpage. The same distinction between plug-ins and extensions is in use by other web browsers, such as Microsoft Internet Explorer, where a typical extension might be a new toolbar, and a plug-in might embed a video player on the page. Since plug-ins and extensions both increase the utility of the original application, Mozilla uses the term "add-on" as an inclusive category of augmentation modules that consists of plug-ins, themes, and search engines.
Read more about this topic: Plug-in (computing)
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