PLUGINS TEND TO be handy additions to your browser, allowing it to carry out additional tasks and add new features to your browser.

Others can be more a hindrance than anything else. If you find one plugin is causing hassle for you and your browsing experience, you can rectify that. Here’s how you can check what plugins are running on your browser.

Chrome

Recently, it disabled any flash-based ads from running on its browser, but if there are videos and other media that you don’t want running anyway, you can still turn them off.

If you go into Settings > Show advanced > Content Settings > Plugins, you select ‘Detect and run important plugin content’ or ‘Let me choose’ which will disable all content until you choose to run it.

If you want to go deeper, you can visit chrome://plugins/ which will show you all the plugins running on your browser.

Firefox

A little more straightforward to work out, you can find the plugins section by going into Menu > Add-ons > Plugins.

Safari

This is probably a little more complex in comparison to the other browser Menu > Preferences > Security > Manage Website Settings. You can manage Adobe Flash Player and other plugins here

Opera

Go into Settings > Websites and you will see Plugins in the fourth section. You have enough options to choose from here but if you want, you can manage individual plugins if there’s one that’s causing particular problems.

Internet Explorer

There are likely some of you who still use IE and if you do, go into Menu >Manage Add-ons. When you’re in the section, click on the dropdown menu that says ‘Currently loaded add-ons’ and select all add-ons. This will give you a better idea of what’s running on your browser.

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