What Are Plug-in Packages?

The rapid evolution of the internet has created a large market for browser plug-ins programs that update your browser with features that it currently lacks. One widely plug-in package, Adobe Acrobat, enables your browser to view pages that have that have  been formatted as Adobe PDF files .PDF files display documents more or less exactly the way they appear in print. Precision can be critical in some applications; a misplaced digit in a financial statement or an altered angle in a technical drawing can result in a major legal problem. Acrobat also helps Web-page authors to control the way their pages display on other computer systems that support PDF.

Other popular types of plug-in packages include those that offer full-duplex phoning and video conferring capabilities, and those that offer improved support for multimedia and virtual reality applications. A drawback to plug-ins is their sheer number. Close to 200 exist for Netscape Navigator alone. Many users are put off by the effort required to download plug-ins and are afraid that ones they've never heard of may interfere with other, working programs on disk. The latter trend has led many people to predict that browsers as we know them today may become extinct in a few years, their functions absorbed into other software packages.