Adding Plug-ins
Although the main type of content provided by Web pages is HTML, many other content types can
be displayed, played, or presented by a Web browser. Most additional data encountered by the
browser is handled by plug-ins.
Applications that help Firefox display content, such as a Flash plug-in, used to be called
Helper Apps. If you are migrating from the Mozilla suite, these helper applications are
now called extensions or plug-ins (both names are used).
Plug-ins are self-contained programs that allow data to play within the Mozilla window.
At the time you open a Web page and data of a specific type is encountered, the browser evaluates
the data based on the following criteria, and then launches the appropriate plug-in.
Suffixes??”If the browser is reading a file that has a particular extension (such as .exe
for an application or .gz for a compressed zip file), it can use that suffix to determine the
file??™s contents. When a file??™s extension matches a suffix configured for a particular plug-in,
the plug-in is used to play or display the data.
MIME type??”Because data may come to the browser in a stream or have no suffix, the
browser can use the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) type attached to the
data to determine which plug-in to use.
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