Quick Introduction to HTML
Plugins and Embedded Objects

Overview

In the early browser heyday, "browser plugins" were used to display media that wasn't otherwise supported by the browser, or to provide user interaction beyond the browser's capabilities.

Some primary examples were Flash video and Java applets.

But there were always compatability problems between different versions of the plugins, the browsers, and the operating systems, and plugins were often to blame for stability problems, and sometimes for security lapses.

As of this writing, support for all browser plugins except Flash has been removed from the Mozilla Firefox browser, and Flash will go away soon, too. The replacement for all these capabilities is supposed to be the HTML 5 standard, which, in contrast to the narrow capabilites (styled text with maybe some images) of older versions of HTML, is a wide umbrella covering various media, including video and interactive graphics. It is a brave new world.

For this reason, the previous discussion in this section has been removed. Please consult instead the replacement page, Media.